15 ms·

Why won't some people pay for news? (2022)

• dredmorbius 2y ago
  Despite a great deal of jawboning and gnashing of teeth about the state of news media and possible remedies there are a number of dimensions of the problem and potential opportunities I rarely see discussed. I'd add to my 2022 comments the following: - When the NY Times hardened its paywall notably in mid-2019, front-page appearances on Hacker News fell to a quarter of their previous trend. There was no policy change at HN, just voting behaviour on submissions. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36918251> (Own data based on a 2023 scrape of all HN front-page activity.) - Broadcast / programmed television seems to be undergoing a similar transition as occurred to newspapers in the past decade. See: "Traditional TV is Dying" <https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/08/traditional-tv-is-dying-can-networks-pivot-and-survive https://www.theguardian.com/film/article/2024/aug/08/traditi...>. - My "short reading list" is available via archive: <https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_advertising_sustainability_externalities/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...> (The subreddit it was posted to is now private protesting Reddit's enshittification.) - Most successful media have had either government support (e.g., the BBC, Deutschlandfunk) or a strong multi-tier financing model. Of the last, the Economist suggests a commercial basis being roughly by thirds subscriptions, advertising, and bespoke research through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). Public broadcasting in the US (NPR, PBS) benefit by member support, commercial underwriting (now little different from ads), and some government support (mostly to local stations). Traditionally within the US commercial publication revenue was based on banner ads, classifieds, legal notices (effectively an obligate support of newspapers by law imposed on private citizens and firms), subscriptions, and news-stand sales. Currently, the ISP as at least a major payment gateway seems a highly underutilised opportunity. What translates to an Internet age is clearly still being worked out, though at the cost of many established institutions, large and small, failing entirely.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    And I've remembered one other additional insight I'd meant to include above: I'd far prefer if more news entities operated like Wikipedia. I'd first noticed this during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, which was a huge, complex, long-evolving story covering a huge area. Trying to get useful information from news media was ... maddening. Even good sources were at best useful for 1) initial reports and 2) a long dribble of additional developments, but after the first day or so reading, listening, or watching news items gave very little clear overview of the story. There've been many, many, many such cases since. The Oroville Dam crisis (a notable press exception was Brad Plumer, then at Vox, whose single-author reportage largely equaled Wikipedia). Covid-19. Various major court cases. Most recently, after hitting several outlets (BBC, CBC, NPR, NY Times, Guardian) over the outbreak of riots in the UK, and trying to relate the news and answer questions to an older relative, I remembered my Wikipedia trick and turned to their coverage. The first paragraph of the Wikipedia article gave all the relevant context far more clearly than any of five or so mainstream media sources I'd turned to. Moreover, the Wikipedia article had on the order of 175 footnotes and references, linked in the article but separated from the text, as footnotes are, meaning that one could read the text as a narrative and NOT be constantly interrupted by attributions as one so often is in current reporting. Yes, it's useful to have sources cited, but doing so as part of the narrative is itself, in my experience, mind-numbing in its own way. And if you're not happy with the Wikipedia coverage, there's the article's "Talk" page, which discusses issues and conflicts amongst editors, at length. At the time I'd checked, the article ran about 18 screens (on my A4 e-ink tablet), only half of which were the actual article, the remainder being references and other Wikipedia "furniture". The Talk page ran 38 screens, which is to say, twice the length of the article and four times the length of the actual text, such that virtually all major conflicts and concerns were voiced there. And of course there's edit history so the reader can see what's changed, when, and by whom. I'd really like to see media organisations adopt a Wikipedia-like format for long, complex, and evolving stories such that it's easy to turn to such a page and get the best, concise, current state of understanding, again with sources and discussion if wanted. Most media organisations, even those which are now fully digital, seem still to embrace the notion of a static printed product, and haven't fully embraced the capabilities of digital production, dissemination, change-control, and disclosure. It's ... disappointing. But we do have Wikipedia, and I'd strongly suggest using it. (A more permissive edit capability on HN, and for that matter, Diaspora*, would also be nifty. Perhaps an earned privilege, probably with strong penalties for abuse, as in "you lose privs". But SRSLY...)
• mintaka5 2y ago
  [dead]
• hondohondo 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • CrazyStat 2y ago
    > Most news is negative, useless and have no material impact on your life. About 15 years ago I heard the concept of the information-action ratio[1] and it totally changed the way I consumed news. As you note, most things in the news are irrelevant to me in the sense that I can’t take any meaningful action based on them. I still read some news—and pay for $1/week subscriptions to multiple newspapers, which they have so far let me renew indefinitely if I threaten to cancel every six months—but I spend much less time following national and global news than I used to. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%E2%80%93action_ratio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information%E2%80%93action_rat...
  • marcuskane2 2y ago
    > State of Hawai'i, which is most authoritarian state, required vaccines or testing before flying in So your bar for "authoritarian state" is not wanting people with a highly infectious, airborne disease to vacation on a remote island where every single hospital was overcapacity? You understand that there were no ICU beds available, emergency services were overwhelmed, nurses and doctors were working perpetual overtime with insufficient resources, etc, right? "Take a test to show you don't have covid before flying to an island with zero capacity to handle more sick people" seems like an incredibly basic, common-sense measure.
    • apercu 2y ago
      [flagged]
    • gottorf 2y ago
      I can't read OP's comment anymore as it has been flagged, but in response to your comment alone: the question isn't whether it's a good idea for someone to travel to Hawaii while positive for Covid in the early days of the pandemic, it's whether the state has the legal authority to halt the liberty of interstate travel[0]. If your answer is that emergency situations warrant such "basic, common-sense" restrictions, then my rebuttal is that a) governments will manufacture as many emergency situations as needed, and b) what is basic and common-sense to one may not be to another and in either case, that ratchet will only go one way; in the direction of authoritarianism. [0]: This liberty has most recently been under controversy again in the context of states wanting to ban travel to other states for the purposes of obtaining an abortion.
• 57FkMytWjyFu 2y ago
  When I realized how many news stories were paid placements, I refused to be billed to read them.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest reducing their incidence?
    • lunarmony 2y ago
      multi-tier payment structures (subscription + ads + paid placements) are very common for most news industry players..
      • dredmorbius 2y ago
        There's also the Economist as I've noted many times, which has a three-tier support: subscriptions, ads, and bespoke consulting through the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). That not only provides multiple funding legs, but also strongly incentivises robust journalism as the publication is effectively an advertisement for the EIU's reports (many of which contribute to substantive reports in print).
• dredmorbius 2y ago
  I'm aware that some people find the news as it exists largely useless. I'm going to suggest that this is in fact a symptom of the larger problem I'm referencing. And that news can be useful, even vital at times. And performs a critical role in a democratic polity. One which is increasingly not being performed, most especially at the local and regional level. And that the proposals I'm making in TFA might be worth discussion in that light. Thanks.
  • sooheon 2y ago
    The closest you've come to a solution is to pay for it with taxes. Is there an example of this working in the wild? Why do you think this is the best solution? Why is the status quo a problem that needs your solution in the first place?
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      Governments exist, amongst other roles, to provide for the common weal, that is, sources of general improvement, which markets and other mechanisms cannot provide. Generally, this is achieved through spending and taxation[1], legislation and regulation, and in some cases specific executive roles. Most functions of government, passage of laws, operation of courts, defence, social welfare, backstop insurance,[2] and public goods and services such as schools, roads, police, fire, ports, and often services including hospitals, sewerage, water, electricity, postal services, and occasionally communications and media. There are of course many instances of media organisations directly funded through governments, most especially in broadcasting: the BBC, ABC (Australia), CBC, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, and more, partial list here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41262025>. Print media has more often been at least nominally privately-held, but often with major indirect public support. In the US that takes the form of discounted postal rates, legal notices, tax breaks, and direct advertising expenditures by governments. See: "A Reminder of Precedents in Subsidizing Newspapers" Jan. 27, 2010, <https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/media/28subsidy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/28/business/media/28subsidy....>. Many of those subsidies have decreased, been eliminated, or no longer apply (e.g., postal discounts given Internet-based distribution) in today's world, and along with other business challenges have made commercial newspaper (or online news-media) operation all the more challenging. A key challenge is that information is a public good, in the economic sense: - It is (mostly) nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. That is, one person's consumption doesn't preclude others doing so (unlike, say, food or land), and it's difficult (though not impossible) to restrict access. - Marginal costs of production, that is, the additional cost for an additional unit produced or consumed, is near nil. This has implications on how market prices fall, which is (absent other manipulation) also near nil. - News and information have high positive externalities. That is, there are benefits to consumption which the producer cannot readily capture through market mechanisms. I've addressed this in more length here: <https://web.archive.org/web/20170611065351/https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_information_goods_and_markets_are_a_poor_match/ https://web.archive.org/web/20170611065351/https://www.reddi...> A lot of this boils down to "there's no easy way to erect tollbooths on the consumption or distribution of information, and high costs in the form of deadweight losses (people excluded from access) from doing so." But there are at least two remaining tollbooths: - The ISP, with whom the reader has an existing financial relationship. - Tax authorities: local (city/county), state, and national. Each of these can charge audiences, and pay publishers, for media accessed online. My proposal is that payments be relatively nominal (on the order of $100 to $400/year for a household), and be made with minimal prejudice to qualifying publishers and authors. (Some independent arbitrator of which publishers qualify, and a mechanism, perhaps itself market based, for payment rates based on media category would probably be part of such a scheme.) Indirect supports analogous to postal-rate subsidies, legal notices, and direct government advertising might also apply. A tax / universal content fee approach directly addresses the many issues of applying markets to information goods (addressed in this comment and links). All successful media models at scale divorce reveneus from consumption. Advertising most particularly. TFA and my many comments (as well as those of numerous others in this thread) address what the failures of the status quo are. Most saliently: news organisations, print, broadcast, and online are simply failing to survive presently, and lack of effective news and informational sources is a key driver of social and political dysfunction. Weak media institutions are highly susceptible to malign influences. ________________________________ Notes: 1. How and whether these two must correspond is ... a longer and tangential discussion. See especially MMT: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_monetary_theory> 2. Flood, earthquake, major storm, other natural disaster, major industrial risks such as nuclear power plants, and the like.
• jmclnx 2y ago
  Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free. Plus I think over the decades, broadcast news morphed into a form of entertainment. And seems well over half the news I have access to is about Sports, Hollywood and who is having sex, which I do not care about.
  • darth_avocado 2y ago
    I used to pay for news, but then news started looking more like opinions and you can pretty much get opinions for free. So I stopped paying.
  • bachmeier 2y ago
    > Use to be very common for people to pay for news (newspapers), but since online, people seem to expect free. I've heard this one many times. I pay for news as part of my streaming TV subscription. Should I also pay the NY Times $325 a year for whatever it is that they're selling? Even setting aside concerns about the quality of the product, news subscriptions are priced way too high given the amount of competition for those dollars. Then they'll monitor everything you do and sell your information to the highest bidder. Then when you realize it's not worth it, they'll put you through hell and back to cancel.
    • jmclnx 2y ago
      Local News Papers were a lot cheaper, plus you got news that no one else was reporting. In most cases the news was balanced back then. Go to a Library and see for yourself by viewing archives.
      • bachmeier 2y ago
        Oh, I'm old enough to remember the days when we were all subscribing to the local newspaper. I'm still thinking about subscribing to our local paper, but last time I checked it was just too expensive, taking into account that all the news I need will get to me by social media, TV, email, or text message.
• KerryJones 2y ago
  The most obvious reason seems to be missing? Because it's split up. You no longer pay "for the news", you pay a specific company for their take. Do you want leftist? Rightist? Something central? You want multiple opinions, will you pay multiple subscriptions? Happily pay $10/mo for a selection of specifics news items.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    See "The closest I’ve come to a solution" in TFA. Thoughts?
    • svachalek 2y ago
      I don't know how you find agreement on what our taxes have to pay for, given how polarized it all is now. I'd much rather a system where my browser anonymously pays a nickel or something to read what I want.
      • dredmorbius 2y ago
        We've had three decades of micropayments proposals, none have worked.[1] Traditionally, publishers have strongly trended toward aggregated rather than disaggregated payment models: you pay for a full issue of a publication at the newsstand, you pay for a year-long subscription of a print publication. Or these days of online publications and streaming services, should you choose to do so. Superbundling (e.g., a single fee providing universal access), a universal content tax, and/or a fee assessed by ISPs (if at all possible indexed to typical household wealth within an area) strike me as far more tractable options. Among the elements of a tax-based system is that there are in fact multiple taxing jurisdictions, and access might be spread amongst them, and through multiple mechanisms. Public libraries already exhibit some of this, with funding being provided at the local (city/county), state, and federal levels, as well as other aggregations such as regional library coalitions, academic institutions and districts (particularly community and state postsecondary institutions), and others.[2] There's also the option of indirect support, which is what mechanisms such as mandatory legal notices entailed: a jurisdiction could require public posting of various sorts (fictitious names, legal settlements and actions, etc.) which effectively require private parties to pay for the upkeep of a newspaper. Similarly, discount "book rate" postage was a distribution subsidy offered to publishers of not only books but newspapers and magazines within the U.S. That's less an issue given the Internet, but the spirit of that idea might be adopted. The idea of local papers which can rely on some level of multi-jurisdictional tax funding, perhaps some charitable or foundational support, advertising, subscriptions, obligatory notices, bespoke research, and other funding sources would give multiple independent funding channels which would be difficult to choke off entirely. That seems far healthier than the present system. ________________________________ Notes: 1. My own argument, and numerous citations to both pro and con views, is "Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not)" <https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudiation_as_the_micropayments_killer_feature/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230606004820/https://old.reddi...>, based on a six-year-old proposal from David Brin which has gone ... precisely nowhere. 2. Yes, I'm aware of certain issues concerning library texts in recent years within the U.S. I'd suggest that the fact that those debates are ongoing rather than settled either way means that overt control isn't completely straightforward.
• oceanplexian 2y ago
  I am astounded that the conclusion the writer comes to is.. socialize the news. Clearly people won’t pay for news because it’s flawed, the product stinks, and the information is biased. So here’s a great idea, let’s steal from everyone via taxes and force them to pay for it! Then it will be good somehow.
  • autoexecbat 2y ago
    Some countries provide government funded news that is of reasonable quality, for example abc.net.au/news
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      Many others, partial listing: - ABC (Australia) - BBC (UK) - CBC (Canada) - CPB, NPR, and PBS (US, though with very limited public funding) - Canal Once, Canal 22, Canal Catorce (Mexico) - DR (Denmark) - Deutshlandfunk, DeutscheWelle and regional broadcasters (NDR, RBB, SWR, MDR, WDR, BR, HR, SR, RB), the last for somewhat interesting denazification reasons. - EBC (Brazil) - ERT (Greece) - NRK (Norway) - Polskie Radio (Poland) - RNZ/TVNZ (New Zealand) - Sveriges Radio/Television (Sweden) - TVN (Chile) - VOA, AFN (US, not broadcast domestically) <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_broadcasting>
      • skirge 2y ago
        I don't know other countries but Polskie Radio and TVP was turned into propaganda machine of who was ruling at the time with News starting with "thanks to the XXX and despite YYY saying it was not possible/stealing/selling to the Germans". It is a reason I'm not watching TV anymore.
  • atrus 2y ago
    I'll nibble. A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from. News is required to be dramatic and sensationalist because that's what attracts attention and gets you those advertising dollar. Certain topics are off limits, because of those advertising dollars. It's basically the concept of "fuck you money" but applied to organizations. Sure, it doesn't solve every problem, but it might solve some.
• dinkblam 2y ago
  i want to pay for reuters but they won't let me. no option to turn off the ads in exchange for payments..
  • apercu 2y ago
    I mean, the shareholders.... think of them....
  • fibonachos 2y ago
    I filled out a contact form some months ago asking how I, as an individual, can purchase an individual subscription. After some back and forth they coul only offer to connect me with their sales team. No thanks. Provide a low friction subscribe and unsubscribe flow, and I will gladly pay for your product, Reuters.
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      Cost of sales is actually a huge issue for all kinds of products and services. It costs a business half or more of all revenue simply to make a sale in many cases. High-friction subscription services and all the support involved is a large piece of this. Many products and services suffer from the fact that they are too cheap to produce to make meaningful individual revenue recovery sensible. Raise the question with your hometown or city. What would it take for Reuters to licence gratis access to all residents through a city-paid arrangement? That's one sales contact for Reuters, and thousands to millions of readers onboarded. Vastly more efficient than one-at-a-time relations.
• nimbius 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godi_media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godi_media This is nothing new and in fact is a feature of having a for-profit 24 hour news media industry that thrives on advertising revenue and flourishes under emaciated regulation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_doctrine the repeal of the fairness doctrine in the United States means your television radio and internet news feeds are free to outright fabricate stories with impunity. commercial news means the product is tailored to the consumer, not congruent with the facts. Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure. You can still have private news agencies, they just cannot market or sell "snake oil" in the service of the dollar. Another alternative is turning all news into something akin to NPR, or having news "co-ops" that provide the service to their listeners for a fee.
  • gottorf 2y ago
    > turning all news into something akin to NPR Why do you see NPR as such a positive example of journalism? It seems to me that it's been skating on its previous good reputation for quite some time now.
    • madrox 2y ago
      I don't think the OP was pointing to it as a example of positivity but an example of a business model (donation supported)
    • paradox460 2y ago
      Likely because NPR has yet to tread on one of their beliefs with biased reporting. It will happen eventually, the rate at which it's happening is accelerating, and when they realize it happens they'll feel the same outage we all did our first time. The umbrage, the "you were supposed to be unbiased" cry I grew up on NPR. It was always on in the background. On the way to and from daycare, in the car on Sunday mornings on the way to the uu church, playing out of a small boom box on the back porch, or winding up the miles of a long road trip. Prairie Home Companion, Car Talk, Schickelie mix, etc, all were the background music to my childhood. When I entered adult life, I tried to continue listening, but leading to, during, and after the 2016 election, the biases became too base, too visible to ignore
• timbit42 2y ago
  It's ridiculous how much they want to charge for an article. Some won't even sell single articles and want a monthly or annual subscription to see everything they produce. I don't want to see everything. I'm not your sheeple. I can't afford to buy 5 or 20 annual subscriptions. I want to read articles from a variety of news sources. I want to pay $20 for 10 articles and be debited for the ones I view. If that takes me 3 days or 3 years to view 10 articles, that's what I want. They will make more money selling articles at a reasonable price than they will selling annual subscriptions full of crap people don't want.
  • apercu 2y ago
    Right? I could buy the entire f*cking Sunday paper for $1.75 and spend three hours reading it on Sunday morning, and take a fun article to work on Monday. I miss those days, though it was probably a huge waste of paper and water. Although the industry actually provided jobs back then. If you simply let me read TFA for $1 or $0.50 I would do that 5 or 10 times a month. But I guess capitalism says that they would rather have 1 person pay $100 a year than 2500 people pay fifty cents once a month.
    • dredmorbius 2y ago
      That's badly outdated pricing data. The daily edition of the New York Times now runs $2 at a news stand, best I can make out.[1] Sunday costs $5 in NYC, $6 elsewhere. Note that the print Sunday edition was (and is) massively underwritten by advertising, which comprises the bulk of the issue, 60--90% by column inch or weight. ________________________________ Notes: 1. <https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-york-times.html https://www.travelizta.com/how-much-is-a-copy-of-the-new-yor...> isn't a particularly impressive source, but it's the best I can find. I cannot find a newsstand price for the Times anywhere on the paper's actual website. Which is another gripe I've got generally: for a commercial product, pricing data are exceedingly difficult to come by.
      • t-writescode 2y ago
        Their point remains.
• apercu 2y ago
  I liked the news better in America before the Fairness Doctrine was revoked by an extreme right wing administration. I also spent a huge chunk of my adulthood in Canada, and I never really minded the CBC, until the last ~10 or so years when (like most institutions and companies) they have lacked any sort of reasonable, competent or rational leadership and now they're combining staff layoffs and massive executive bonuses, which is the ridiculous reality of the world we live in.
• jaredwiener 2y ago
  For what its worth, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because - and full disclosure -- I've been working on a startup for news. (More on that below.) But let's rewind a little bit, because chances are that just a few decades ago, you (or your parents) probably did pay for news, through a newspaper subscription, or cable fees, etc. The Internet came out, and it seemed natural to offer news for free online. For years, printed newspapers cost so little that the real money came in from advertising. Delivering it digitally was a huge cost savings -- no printing -- so why not just put it online and advertise against it? That kind of worked, even with a saturated online advertising market. The big problem was social media, and aggregators. These should be a net benefit -- or at least it would seem, on paper. Very popular sites linking to your article? That's great! Traffic will come, you can sell ads, profit. There's a downside, though. People stopped going to news homepages -- because the links go to articles. Think back to when you used to hold a print newspaper -- or just imagine it, if you never did. You bought the newspaper, or you subscribed. Regardless, the transaction came about because you wanted to be kept up to date. It didn't generally matter what was inside the newspaper -- there was a trust/gamble that the $1 (or whatever it was) you paid for the paper would be worth it. You'd flip through the pages, and there would be articles and ads. It didnt matter which articles you read, which you skipped, you saw the same number of ads, and they had value. Now, that front page is an aggregator or a social feed. Sites need to get your attention so that you will click through -- so they can show you ads, or a paywall -- however they monetize. They cannot monetize if you don't click. If you write a really good headline, one that actually summarizes the story -- you give the user little reason to click through. There's no monetization. So you write clickbait. And your editors start to look at what gets traffic spikes, and they redouble their efforts on those topics, which aren't always the most newsworthy. Further, you're now competing against everyone with a keyboard. They don't have to do the work like you do -- they aren't held to ethical or professional standards, they dont have to do the shoeleather reporting, they just type. -- As mentioned above, this is why I'm building Forth (www.forth.news). The idea is a news feed for news -- where all of our posts come from real journalists. Our hope (and we're admittedly not there yet) is to monetize the headlines -- and let users read the way they want to, in a feed, with all sorts of topics -- but actually make it financially viable for the people doing the reporting.
  • 2y ago
• madrox 2y ago
  I think the author is in the right ballpark, but frames it in a way that makes me wonder if they're right for the wrong reason. News has always been partisan and flawed. The internet just makes the flaws more obvious, because no single source gets nearly the same control over the narrative as pre-internet. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way about things, news will have this problem. Which is also why no one will pay for it. As long as someone stands to benefit from you thinking a certain way, they'll happily give you that content for free. How can a subscription service compete with that? The article does cite these reasons, but in a way that makes me think they see these as bugs in the system and not endemic to the newscycle. When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product.
  • Viliam1234 2y ago
    > When you aren't paying for the product, then you ARE the product. Sometimes, even when you are paying for the product, you are the product. Nothing prevents companies from taking money from you and then making more money e.g. by selling your personal data.
    • madrox 2y ago
      Quite right
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Author here. Channel diversification has ... interesting characteristics. On the one hand, for video and audio news, there's a much stronger diversification over pre-Internet times in which the US had only three major television networks, with roughly the same structure in radio, and other countries also typically had few broadcasters, often nationalised or publicly-controlled (as opposed to private enterprise). On the other, cities which used to have multiple newspapers (not infrequently dozens in the early 20th century) may have one, or none at all. At the same time, much news comes from a fairly limited number of sources, notably news wires (AP, UPI, Reuters, AFP). Television news long relied on newspaper and newswire coverage to shape news priorities for a given day (see Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere). One thing Internet distribution does isn't so much to create a large number of news sources (which may or may not have much by way of independent story discovery or sourcing) as to tear up a given publication and disaggregate its articles, piecing them out one-at-a-time online. The experience of reading news online, even from a given news site is quite different from that of leafing through a broadsheet newspaper or bound magazine in print. Add in news aggregators, discussion sites (including HN), and social media, and the situation's further exacerbated. There are well over 100 news publishers regularly represented on HN. Subscribing individually to each of those would be prohibitive.
• impure 2y ago
  I have trouble believing any of these reasons. You don't pay for news because you can get it for free elsewhere. You don't have to be all high and mighty about it. This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want.
  • fritzo 2y ago
    I can vouch for H: The incessant upselling. I'd like to pay for the Economist, but last time I unsubscribed, they forced me to wait on phone hold for a half hour, then go through another half hour of verbal upselling spiel, like "have you considered changing to a biannual subscription?". Never again.
    • linza 2y ago
      I'd pay for news, even bad ones. I see it like a donation to the Red Cross or something. My experience and reasons for not paying anymore are similar. Used to pay for The Guardian for some time, but when they started pestering me about a subscription renewal the whole thing felt a lot less classy. Now it suddenly was about me and not news anymore. Me too: never again. I would pay for anonymous vouchers or similar where I'm not identifiable to the newspaper, though.
  • rrr_oh_man 2y ago
    > This reminds me of users which complain about feature X. But when you fix feature X nothing changes and they move on to complaining about feature Y. People are very bad at knowing what they want. Don't write code, don't talk to users?
  • re-thc 2y ago
    > You don't pay for news because you can get it for free elsewhere. There's also just too much news these days and most of it isn't important. It's saturated. Maybe if we cut down on the number of media outlets. You used to just buy 1-2 newspapers at most but the equivalent now is likely 5-10. And each 1 would be 2x as thick.
• deadfece 2y ago
  Allow me to offer my opinion without reading the article: I can and do pay for news, I just dislike the bait and switch with modals/popovers that much. Now that I can no longer block domains in my Google search results, I can't remove those paywalled sites from relevancy and it's hard to keep track of everyone who only lets you read the first paragraph and a half before sticking their hand out asking for $10. ETA: I have now read the article and have no revisions to my statements.
• 627467 2y ago
  most news is really just entertainment disguised as life-changing information. deep down everyone knows it. so, now it competes with all other forms of entertainment
• motohagiography 2y ago
  BBC and CBC are already public agencies, as the author suggested as a solution. arguably, given who pays them, the party of the official opposition should appoint the heads of them both. imo non-partisanship was the artifact of another time. in another life i wrote occasionally for establishment media and met many players, and i don't bother with any mainstream news anymore. these days i prefer to read the writing on the wall.
  • stephen_g 2y ago
    That doesn't seem like a solid strategy - for example, here in Australia the current opposition are the ones who did appoint the heads of our national broadcaster (when in Government) and were widely condemned for the political nature of the appointments (actually bypassing an independent selection board to make ideologically motivated appointments) and also for their political interference (or attempts at it) both while in Government and while in opposition (as they are currently). Their attempts at political manipulation is arguably even stronger while in opposition, so if anything they would be even more likely to make politically and ideologically motivated appointments!
    • motohagiography 2y ago
      my argument is that media is the only real loyal opposition, and so being appointed for the term would have them do their actual job instead of the influence peddling they're reduced to now.
• taeric 2y ago
  This is ignoring the question of "what is the value of news for most people?" It is clearly of high value for people that can to make informed decisions. Unfortunately, most decisions people are making are not informed by the news. Such that any attempt to get people to pay for it will be difficult.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    That's a good insight, and suggests another: for whom is the news of significant value? What I've noticed both through my own experience and research of the history of journalism is that business news has, in general tended to be far more reliable then general-consumption news, if also strongly self-serving to the interests of business and fiance. Amongst the best quality news sources that I find presently are the Economist and Financial Times, with Foreign Policy also standing high. The Wall Street Journal had a very strong (if of course pro-business) reputation when it was still owned by the Dow Jones corporation, somewhat less so of late. Newswires such as AP, Reuters, and AFP are also generally quite good. You can also find regional business news publications of high quality and relevance, especially as compared with their non-business local counterparts. In debunking a century-plus old hoax (the "Banker's Manifesto") a few years back, one of the more amusing bits I'd found was that of all the claims it made, one which was more easily addressed was a mention-in-passing of the failures of several banks. It turns out that of all the things that a bank-centric publication is interested in, it's the solvency of financial institutions, and the bulk of any given issue addressed insolvencies and failures, of which those mentioned in the (bogus) manifesto made no appearance... I suspect that a large reason for greater relevance and accuracy is that business news tends to be actionable to businesses, executives, and managers. I also suspect that misquotations and misrepresentations of interviews tend to get sharp responses. By contrast, the principle operating principle of a mass-market paper is to maximise circulation and eyeballs. At the worst of the Penny Papers this lead to outright hoaxes (e.g., the Great Moon Hoax: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax>). And of course, with large circulations it was also possible to steer public opinion (e.g., exploiting the explosion of the USS Maine to incite the Spanish-American war by Hearst and Pulitzer: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Maine_(1889)#Yellow_journa...>). But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.
• t-writescode 2y ago
  I think it's because people don't find news through news sites anymore. They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then want to read a single article. Then you're prompted with a paywall that requires you to dedicate yourself to a single news company (or have multiple companies) and pay them $4 to $40 / mo - usually on the cheap-but-then-expensive-in-6-months-when-you-forget model). I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate subscription that covers all the major players *OR* if I could pay per-article from a centralized grab-bag. I don't want to see an interesting topic and then need to go to the NYT to see their take on it. I just want to see an interesting topic and read that view of it - maybe read several views of it (and happily pay for each one).
  • nottorp 2y ago
    > They find news through a third-party, like Reddit, and then want to read a single article. or HN :) No, I won't pay a subscription for each random site that gets posted on here. I might pay a few cents, if it's a unified service as you say, but micropayments are 10 years away every year.
  • NaOH 2y ago
    >I would absolutely pay for news if I could get an aggregate subscription that covers all the major players.... Isn't this what the Apple News+ service offers? I haven't used it, but for US $13 per month Apple says it offers content from over 400 publications. Of course it necessitates using one of the Apple OS platforms, and I've heard both good and bad about the overall design and presentation of the content, but it seems like this kind of service is akin to what you describe. I'd think this kind of broad offering would appeal to readers more than a single-site subscription. The Apple cost of $13 per month sounds much better than, say, the NY Times cost of $25 every four weeks, but maybe the Apple access to publications is limited or has other problematic attributes.
    • jlund-molfese 2y ago
      It should, but like you said, Apple’s access is somewhat limited. I don’t think that’s the main problem though. The main reason I unsubscribed is that Apple News+ still has ads and prompts to sign up for newsletters! It’s a usability issue; the newspaper equivalent of torrenting music, archive.is offers a far superior reading experience and just so happens to be free. The industry needs something like Spotify or Steam to fix it.
• wrp 2y ago
  Local newspapers should not be used as a point of comparison. When we subscribed to the city newspaper, it easily paid for itself in coupons and awareness of sales. There would also be notice of civic affairs that directly affected our lives. National and world news was essentially added entertainment. Before complaining that people aren't willing to pay for online news, recall that they didn't pay for national broadcast news either.
  • lvspiff 2y ago
    My parents still pay for the local newspaper to be delivered at home but it went from every day to I think now twice a week - Sunday and Wednesday or something like that. Same price, they get a "free" online subscription in addition to paper, but its still disappointing to not be able to have a paper with morning coffee anymore.
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      A few months back I was looking through the local paper, when I visited my parents. My dad note: "I don't think we'll be resubscribing this year. There's almost no articles left at the price went up again". The paper covers an area of around 1 million people. They have no correspondents, with the exception of a small team at the Danish parliament. All their "journalists" are centralised in the regional "capital". I'm sure that their reporters are actual journalists, just not very good writers. All foreign news are provide by Reuters or some other news service, with a little rewrite and no adding of information from other sources. There simply isn't enough news in the area, to make a daily newspaper necessary and they don't have the staff to add much value to the national and international coverage. For this newspaper, which is mostly ads and very poorly written articles they charge the equivalent of $1250 per year. That is absolutely insane, you can get a legitimate good paper for $890 per year, but that will not have the local angle and there are very few other sources for local news. I don't agree that you shouldn't follow the news, but I'd argue that you don't need daily coverage, that's pointless as well. Daily provides no time for details to emerge, no time for investigation or second sources. Weekly is absolutely fine, anymore frequent and the news degenerate and the media becomes an ad hellscape to cover the cost of publishing.
• flimsypremise 2y ago
  Because I don't want to pay monthly for a bunch of content I probably won't read. I want to pay a small amount of money, with as little friction as possible, for the specific content I want to read now.
  • hakanito 2y ago
    This is what I want too. Been wanting it for years. Maybe once payments are bundled into the browser coupled with some W3 standard…
    • 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
      That's been a dream for nearly as long as the web has been around. I'm pretty sure there are mailing list threads from the '90s about turning micropayments into a standardized web API. As far as I can tell, this never caught on because it's almost always more profitable to operate your own paywall scheme or payment network than to participate in someone else's (provided that you're powerful enough to get away with it).
      • hakanito 2y ago
        The point is you should be able to operate you own paywall. The tech is mature enough in 2024 to make it work. Make the browser store you credit/debit card info, make the browser handle the payment UI, make the browser expose JS apis to invoke payments and receipt fetching against pluggable payment providers. My ideal world looks like this. New html button element: `<pay amount="1.00" currency="USD" reference="my-article-123" checkoutUrl="https://...">Unlock https://...">Unlock for $1.00</pay>` Clicking it opens browser checkout flow. The url you get from stripe/paypal or another whitelisted payment provider that has implemented the spec, some flow similar to OAuth. On a successful tx, a signed receipt (something like a jwt) is returned from the provider and saved by the browser, on disk on your computer. The webpage can then load signed receipt references from the browser api, sends it to the backend which can return the article content if the receipt jwt is valid. It can be fixed if the right people from Chrome and Stripe got together in a room and brainstormed for a bit. Then everyone else would follow.
• rufus_foreman 2y ago
  I sometimes pay for news, and when I do, I do it by buying print versions for the reasons (H) and (I) in the article, "The incessent upselling" and "Privacy". He writes "Dropping a quarter, or even five bucks, on the counter at a newsstand for a copy of the daily paper or a copy of The Economist meant that some sleezy dude snooping through my entire life history wasn’t sea-lioning into every possible situation trying to push me to the next higher cost bracket". I can still buy the print version of the Economist at the newsstand (OK, Barnes & Noble) and I can still buy a print copy of the WSJ at the grocery store or convenience store. I paid, hmm, looks like $11.49 plus tax for the last print version of the Economist I bought. Will I consider paying $6 or so an issue for a subscription to the online version? No, I will not. I paid, I think, $5 plus tax for the last print WSJ weekend edition I bought. Will I consider paying $40 a month for a digital subscription? No, I will not. Here are my requirements: I can pay in cash per issue with no way for the publisher to tell I bought it or to track my reading in any way. Don't meet my requirements? Totally fine. But if you don't, I'm not paying for your product. Go complain to someone else.
• specialist 2y ago
  Agree with all. Yes and: Most of what we now label "news" is actually infotainment. aka USA Today. Which is distinct from previous incarnations of tabloids, yellow journalism, phamphleteering, etc. Ad supported media (structurally) cannot sustainably create real news. It just doesn't pencil out. FWIW I happily pay for quality media creating real news, opinion, and analysis. (starting with Propublica, Five to Four, Volts, Know Your Enemy.) More so over time, as I discover more good stuff.
• seabass-labrax 2y ago
  (Started writing this as a response to mhb[1], but posting at the top-level because I think it's generally relevant.) Most newspapers have deliberately promoted the online editions in preference to their traditional print editions, which is compromising the economies of scale in printing. The online edition of the New York Times is half the price of the print edition because they want it to be, not because that would be its natural market price. A specific newspaper is not a free market resource; the editorial stance and quality is exclusive. But assume for sake of argument that it is: that there are dozens of different companies that can produce the New York Times. As long as the physical quality (of the ink, paper etc.) is adequate, consumers will purchase the paper which is cheapest. Eventually, a monopoly would emerge due the economies of scale - the producer which sells the most papers would also be able to provide the lowest prices. Yet, this hypothetical printer would still be kept honest because, with no exclusivity over printing, they couldn't raise their prices above the basic printing cost of a single copy (which does not benefit from economies of scale). Here's the key part of the argument: the difference between the online and print edition is $3. For less than $3, I can print the entire Sunday edition at home, probably on higher quality paper too. That means that the New York Times are deliberately over-pricing the print edition relative to their online edition. They can do this because they hold copyright over the text. They want to do this because they can target advertising to individuals, lock customers into subscriptions more easily online, show attention-grabbing multimedia and a do whole litany of other profitable things. I should note that abolishing copyright wouldn't fix the problem, because that would drive prices down below even the true market value of journalism. This is because nobody would want be the first to purchase a copy of the article; wait a little longer and someone else will sell you theirs at a discount. I personally believe it would be closer to the real value than the status quo, but it is still below it, and that isn't a sustainable income for journalists. It would harm professional journalism eventually. Ensuring that anyone is allowed to republish an article verbatim at a fixed royalty - a royalty no higher than the price of the online edition - would, I think, go a long way to making print editions reflect their actual relative value compared to electronic publishing. Legislation permitting format-shifting, and resale of the format-shifted work, would facilitate this. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261282
• Barrin92 2y ago
  The article makes a lot of pretty bold assumptions and conclusions (i.e. that the media is to blame for increased partisanship, causality isn't clear at all, partisanship might drive media behavior etc), but the entire article is basically I think almost useless without a baseline comparison, namely if people are less likely to pay for news than they are less likely to pay for anything else and I don't think that's true. People pay for virtually nothing on the internet if they can get a free (usually ad driven) alternative. Be it search, web browers, apps, youtube, tiktok, with digital services the norm is usually that the service is free, a small percentage will pay for premium, so in that sense news functions literally just like anything else and the reluctance to pay isn't enough to make unsubstantiated claims about quality or bias in the news.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    My claim was "Partisanship has increased to the point that trust in any opposing news media is all but nil. In numerous cases, the media themselves are entirely to blame." The first is simply a recognition that partisanship as a whole has increased, without ascribing causality. The second is a fair note that there's been an increase in overtly partisan major news sources, which again is pretty well founded. Fox News in the US beginning in the 1990s, right-wing talk radio (attempts to create a left-wing alternative have largely foundered, see Air America), and increasingly branding of even major news organisations as leaning strongly to one political party or the other: WSJ (Murdoch-owned and GOP), NYT (Dem), MSNBC (Dem), Sinclair (GOP), etc. (I'm focusing on the US, there are of course examples elsewhere, notably in the UK, DE, FR, and AU press.) You make a point that I agree with strongly, and probably gets at a key mechanism: "People pay for virtually nothing on the internet if they can get a free (usually ad driven) alternative." This is absolutely true, and has exceptionally pernicious impacts not only on how content is funded, but what content is sustainable. Advertising is dependent on many eyeballs, common appeal, and reasonably-advertiser-friendly content. There are types of content which thrive in such a world, and many, many, many types which do not. A large part of my argument is in finding alternative paths to funding which give content which struggles under an ad-centric market, and which has substantial social value. For reasons argued both within my essay and elsewhere (and I can give further reading on request) markets and information play together poorly.
• RigelKentaurus 2y ago
  Because it's a lousy product. -Because opinion pieces increasing masquerade as news articles. -Because journalists have no comprehension of basic math and statistics, so stats like "a woman earns $0.72 for each $1 earned by a man" are taken at face value or parroted endlessly. Most news articles show a lack of critical thinking. -Context is deliberately avoided to paint nuanced topics as black and white. -Graphs are intentionally created in a way to provoke outrage instead of understanding. -Clickbait titles. Sadly, all of this is true even for paid news such as NYT, WSJ etc.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest improving the situation?
    • dotnet00 2y ago
      I think there are several parts to the cause, there's the issue that 'professional' journalists often act like their job is sacred and their credentials make them superior to 'indie' journalists and other 'commoner' scum despite the current standards being even lower than what it'd take for someone without a CS degree to write code. We see this alot in relation to the discourse around misinformation or reporting on violent events on sanitized platforms like YouTube. This makes people question why they should bother paying for the opinion of someone who looks down on them. Then there's the other issue that we see even scientists frequently make mistakes interpreting data despite having a far more rigorous education and far more experience interpreting data and risking significant professional consequences if caught. But journalists have none of that, they don't have to actually understand what they're trying to report on, they don't have to interpret the data in good faith and they don't really face any consequences for being wrong. A scientist might end up having to retract a paper if it's wrong, a journalist doesn't even necessarily have to add a correction. This also leads into an additional issue about journalists who specialize in certain things. Like, say, games journalists, tech journalists, aerospace journalists, medical journalists etc. Often they don't have any expertise in the field they're reporting on, it's so common for: - tech journalists to report obviously incorrect interpretations of basic technical matters - game journalists to be completely out of touch with gaming - aerospace journalists to report information that makes it obvious they don't know/care about the accuracy of what they're saying (there's an example from just a few days ago, of a journalist latching onto one typo of a number reported correctly in several other parts of the report for a hit piece, refusing to issue a proper correction despite being publicly called out by the company they targeted) - medical journalists to report research results without understanding the caveats or confidence levels of the study (eg the jumping back and forth on how coffee can provide X health benefit) - tv/movie journalists to have opinions that are more often than not completely opposite to those of the public, complete with looking down on the public disdainfully for the disagreement rather than updating their reporting style to at least also fairly cover public sentiment These are topics people tend to be passionate about and thus are more likely to spot issues, which reduces trust in journalism as a whole. After all, if the reporting on a topic they follow in depth is so bad, how bad might the reporting on topics they don't know as much about be? To me, the solution would be to make professional journalism actually require skills and that they also need to have some humility. Like, a tech journalist should be someone who has had decent experience in the tech field, such that they understand the technology they're covering.
• grogenaut 2y ago
  Because every news place I've signed up for make it a giant pain in the A$$ to unsubscribe, so they just lost all of my trust. The only one that didn't suck was when I got the FT (paper) version for a year for like 800 airline miles. Oddly the digital subscription was MORE. That was great and 10 years later I'm still using pink paper to light my fires.
  • noirbot 2y ago
    This is a big part of it for me. I used to subscribe to a news site that I generally liked, and when I went to cancel it for financial reasons, the experience was so painful that it turned me off of wanting to engage with the entire company again, even though I liked their writing and coverage.
• bcatanzaro 2y ago
  I feel like I pay a lot for news. I pay for: * WSJ * NYTimes * Economist * LATimes * SJ Mercury News * Apple News And yet I constantly run into paywalls (which I circumvent). How much per month does the news industry think is fair for me to pay? I wish I could just pay a fee per article I read. I think the business model is broken because there are too many individual entities and they all want a subscription. And this makes no sense in the age of the internet.
• davidmurdoch 2y ago
  I'm more likely to pay money to never see "news".
• meiraleal 2y ago
  The payment for news is the influence they get on society. There will always be billionaires and millionaires willing to subside it.
• 65 2y ago
  I used to work for newspapers (as a software engineer) so I'm very familiar with this conundrum. Ultimately it's the value proposition, particularly with regional newspapers. I worked at a regional newspaper and their subscription price was more than the New York Times. Their subscriber base was basically all old, suburban white people who still got print newspapers. Print is still the cash cow of regionals to this day. They had terrible technology. Stories, of course, were always presented as... stories. They were stuck in their ways. No emphasis on, like the post mentions, creating good data products - e.g. events, restaurants, weather maps, etc. A big hurdle for newspapers is, yes, on giving away their news for free in the early days of the web - creating a certain expectation. But also their arrogance of not adapting to the times. The Charlotte Agenda was one of the only digital only profitable news publications before it got bought by Axios. They made money from a jobs board and other ideas (that I am now forgetting) that would cater to a regional audience. News people tend to think "journalism is sacred" to the point of myopia. Their product is outdated. I read the New York Times for national news, but regional news (which is the majority of newspapers) consistently don't appeal to me. Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood? Yes, give me important stories, but also give me visuals and data and products that would fit into the "not video" segment. Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview. Give me information that can't be expressed in video and that isn't 2000 words long with long, drawn out flowery language. Needless to say I don't work in news anymore. The people are very interesting and I'd work in news again. But at the end of the day newspapers are selling fax machines.
  • exodust 2y ago
    For a different perspective on print news, consider for a moment the vastly improved reading environment in your typical newspaper reader's home. When visiting my Aunty, it was obvious why newspapers are favoured in her house. They had a big sun-room at rear, with big tables where numerous newspapers were found spread out in various stages of completion. One glance across the table provided immediate feedback on a range of headlines, pictures, and articles. You can instantly see how long a piece will take to read. So with coffee in hand, you sit down and enjoy the experience. Newspapers when spread out on tables provide superior readability than a single screen tablet where scrolling and wrestling all the annoyances is a test of patience. If someone invents a lightweight digital "book" the size of a newspaper but containing less pages, maybe 10 or 20 double-sided digital e-ink pages that can be turned like real pages, I believe people will buy it. The spine would allow the book to lie flat on any page, like a ring-bound book. When you get to the end, obviously you could choose to load up the next 10 pages from that publisher, or switch to a different publication. Importantly, the book can be left open, laying around the house for the next person to wander in with their coffee, sit down and have a relaxing browse though stories both local and global. No annoyances, no pop-ups, no tracking how long it takes you to read a page or any of that nonsense. Before we label regional people "outdated", perhaps consider they simply like better reading experiences with their morning coffee.
• httpz 2y ago
  I see news as three parts: facts, opinions, and curation. There are plenty of free and reputable news sources and paying doesn't seem to increase the credibility of the news. So we're effectively paying for the opinion and curation. However, I don't feel the need to pay to read about a random journalists opinion nor the curation of a (possibly politically motivated) editor when I can read hundreds of people's opinions nicely curated by upvotes on sites like Reddit and Hacker News. I have to admin, I spend far more time reading comments than the actual article.
• singleshot_ 2y ago
  Because it's not a good and it's not a service. It's not enjoyable, not pleasurable, and usually not well-made. It doesn't inspire thought or confidence and it's not actionable. It's my responsibility to be informed and it's a requirement of a free country that we all be informed, but it's not something I'm willing to trade for money because money is valuable and knowledge of current events is just drudgery (pun only intended after the fact).
  • altdataseller 2y ago
    +1. It doesn't entertain me, and it doesn't help me make more money. And I don't need it to survive. I think that pretty much sums it up
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • willdr 2y ago
    Does this argument then reinforce the value of government news orgs like we see in Australia (ABC) & England (BBC) - if England's was to exist without the draconian tv licence? Edited: I didnt mean impartial but rather non-commercial, updated.
    • mrmlz 2y ago
      But it all comes down to the execution of it. Sweden has a Public Service thats financed by a tax-like-system. Swedish public service is imho very bad. Its shallow, narrow, angled and generally never (or rarely) leaves you feeling informed. Their debates are laughable, their interviews are short, uninformed (the interviewer is) and is generally closer to gotcha-journalism than whatever a random Youtube-interview is where they get to complete their sentences. The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very little to show for it. It should be reformed.
      • martin_a 2y ago
        > The Swedish PS has an enourmous budget and has very little to show for it. It should be reformed. Same goes for Germany. It's also a system heavily under critique. There are something like 20 public tv stations and 50 public broadcasts but they all cater to a rather narrow audience of age 50+ people with lots of folk music, old shows and whatnot. Young people are not represented. It's a shame, there could be so much good stuff out there.
• rayiner 2y ago
  Because it’s mostly not useful? I feel like people have some nostalgia for “the news.” But consider your own industry. How many people find tech industry news coverage useful and informative? Why does anyone think the coverage is better for anything else?
• RollAHardSix 2y ago
  I guess I should post...something. Lack of relevancy. I don't watch the news, don't even watch the weather, I don't vote or care about politics, I don't listen to the radio in the car, I went years without even looking at Hacker News, don't use reddit outside of work-related subs, don't use facebook, or other social media. I don't even use youtube except when I want to see some highlight video of Iverson or Pippen or a player soccer highlight (but not match recaps), or the occasional music of an artist stuck in my head. Why would I? The news isn't going to mow my yard, politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work. There is just nothing in the news for me. I suspect this feeling will continue to grow sharply with the youngest generation (I'm mid thirties personally but my teenage daughter has shared her classmates feel apathetic towards current events etc).
  • wespad 2y ago
    > The news isn't going to mow my yard, politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work. Ain't that the truth.
  • presentation 2y ago
    Personally I find that the weather is pretty actionable.
    • asdff 2y ago
      Highly regional dependent. Some places in the U.S. you could do without any weather reporting. Hot yesterday? Probably will be hot today. Cold today? Probably cold tomorrow. It all comes from NOAA anyhow. You could just drink right from the spigot like the meteorologists do, cut them out, and not miss anything.
      • presentation 2y ago
        I live in Tokyo so during the rainy and typhoon seasons it’s the difference between staying dry and getting soaked - but it is definitely like that in the winter (except instead I pay attention to the snow forecasts in the nearby mountains to know when I should pack up and go snowboarding…)
• tgsovlerkhgsel 2y ago
  1. Ridiculous fragmentation. 2. Ridiculous pricing. There are currently articles from two paywalled sources on the front page of HN, Bloomberg and New Yorker. Neither of them are what I consider "the news", so subscribing to only these two would not be sufficient. The New Yorker charges $10.83 per month (obfuscated by pricing in "per week"), for rather niche content. Bloomberg charges $34.99 (!) per month - enough to cover 2-4 movie streaming services depending on subscription level. New York Times, another approximately $13 per month (obfuscated by making even the "per week" pricing nearly impossible to find, i.e. you know they're going to make it a pain to cancel). The Washington Post? I think it would be 60 EUR (i.e. I assume they do region-based pricing) per year for the annual subscription, but they made it hard to find out what the price after the trial period would be (i.e. if I had considered paying them, I'd now be put off because I'd expect sleazy behavior). The NYT and WP are much less bad than I actually thought, but that still means you are paying the price of a streaming service subscription, but unless you limit yourself to one source and never follow links people send you, you keep getting hit by paywalls from all the other media that you didn't subscribe to. None of this gives me local media, where the situation is even worse. Everything aside from a few low quality sources is paywalled, and each paywall is separate, even if the newspapers belong to the same group... so if you pay for your local newspaper/edition, but the article was published in the other region's newspaper (from the same company), tough luck, pay again. The first article I found on one such site was based on a WSJ article... which, if I wanted to read it, would be another ~$10/month (don't know the US price) paywall. The more respectable of the two major local ones offers two separate subscriptions, one for ~30 USD/month, but that only gives you some articles, and another for about $40 USD/month that actually gives you access to all of their articles. Only their weekday edition though, their sunday edition is extra. So, to get any meaningful value (in the sense of no longer hitting paywalls every time I click a link, I'd probably have to subscribe to at least $50/month worth of subscriptions. Just doing that would be a chore in itself. Then I'd have to sign in on every device where I actually want to read these news. So that's at least my personal phone, work phone, personal computer, work computer (sometimes people send links at work). I have free access to some media through a corporate subscription, and just the hassle of having to log in is usually enough to either find a paywall bypass or skip the article. Then, it's really hard to convince me that their product is superior to the free alternatives. I can see the various ways that the free alternatives suck (clickbait etc.), but I've also seen the paid ones engage in different but equally infuriating practices (e.g. not getting to the point and rather blathering on for pages and pages with meaningless speculation just so readers feel like they're getting something for their money). Also, even if you pay, many will subject you to ads and other abusive experiences (some will gladly remove that pain if you pay just a little more...)
• testrun 2y ago
  I think the reasons are: 1. Interests: We are interested in certain categories(for instance finance and sport), but if you subscribe to a news organisation (say New York Times), you get the whole caboodle, but only their version of finance and sport. What many people prefer is to have multiple sources of finance and sport, but that means that they need to subscribe to various news outlets to get it. 2. Short: We want the the short and easy digestible version (preferable video, but if you insists audio). 3. Sweet: And don't make me think.
• calebh 2y ago
  Some people here have mentioned microtransactions for news, and that reminded me of an app I used to use called Blendle. Back in the day you used to be able to top off your account and pay <$1 for each news article. I used to use it quite a bit. From what I can find online, the business model never succeeded, and the majority of the people who downloaded the app never actually made any microtransactions. It's a shame because I really enjoyed it.
  • eitland 2y ago
    Blendle was really cool, but they 1. didn't have the stuff I was looking for (tech comes to mind). I was still trying to use it hoping more magazines would come along. 2. changed their model. It is a few years ago now, but I think there were two things: 2 a) the original model had a time limit were you could look at an article and if you immediately realized it wasn't your thing you could go back within x seconds and not pay. 2 b) IIRC they also switched from a reasonable pay-per-view price to an "all you can eat (from our very limited buffet)" model. I think it was at this time I stopped checking and gave them up. "Pay monthly and have access to everything"-models are only really attractive if you have access to everything you want: Spotify and Apple Music are good examples here.
  • d_k_h 2y ago
    <$1 isn't a micro-transaction imo. It needs to be a fraction of cent.
• ggm 2y ago
  I paid a guardian subscription for years. They upped the price twice, significantly more than inflation overall and they nagged me endlessly for donations. When you already pay being begged at is tiresome. I decided to stop paying and put up with the begging. I gave my money to another independent news source for a year or two instead and I will revisit this in a while. Their international edition was fantastic. Printed on airmail tissue paper and federating several other news sources, weekly. I'd pay for that again.
• vsuperpower2021 2y ago
  Why won't some people pay for blockbuster movies?
• rickydroll 2y ago
  Cost. I added up the cost of subscriptions to cover what I read for "free," and it came to over $2500/yr. Then, there is the inability to archive stories without going to paper and turning my house into a hoarder's palace.
• focusgroup0 2y ago
  > Why won't some people pay for propaganda? edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... is why I don't btw
• Peteragain 2y ago
  I'll agree the problem with "unbiased" news (BBC locally) is the uncritical regurgitation of positions, and the questions that are not asked. The alternative is to read bias media from all sides and compensate for the bias. Voice of America, Russia Today, BBC world service, and yes, SBS Australia. You know where they are coming from. The Murdoch press cannot offend anyone around the world and so their news must inevitably be content free.
• nextlevelwizard 2y ago
  Just because most news isn't news. If something major happens in the world you will know without following news.
  • mdp2021 2y ago
    Important news often go unnoticed, drowned in the main stream of news.
• INTPenis 2y ago
  I'm one of those people and paying for the news is like paying for the word on the street. It'll reach you eventually. You're actually paying for their articles, which they write and angle so that you should feel like you get some value for your money. So I guess you can conclude by saying, paying for anything makes it profitable to someone, which also makes it exploitable to squeeze more profits out of the consumer. I'm more ok with paying for a low quality toolbox than a low quality thought.
• L-four 2y ago
  It's to hard and to expensive.
• Refusing23 2y ago
  MOST news is negative and negativity makes me sad so i just avoid news all together. i do read up on a few specific topics every now and again but... overall, i dont need the negativity in my life
• Dalewyn 2y ago
  Why don't I? Because journalists are merely peddlers of sensation, taking my money so I can feel angry and sad at their pleasure. Sincerely fuck that noise, they are cancers of society. You could, of course, argue I am placing the cart before the horse. Journalism is a cancer because I am not giving them my money, you could argue. But you know what? Fine. That doesn't change the fact they are a cancer. I am not paying for cancer. Sincerely fuck that noise. The world would be much more pleasant without journalism. Note: Mother passed from gastric cancer. If I am calling someone or something a cancer, I fucking mean it.
  • CyberDildonics 2y ago
    Journalists are taking your money? The people investigating corporate and political corruption are society's cancer? In the past, people wanting to get rid of journalism have not been on the right side of history.
• usrusr 2y ago
  It's not just that partisanship has increased: the age of ad-funded has deeply spoiled us with its ability to easily sample the whole spectrum. Even people who hardly ever put that to use (e.g. me) would perceive subscribing to a single source (or two) as a downgrade from what they have. Not a good setup to sell something. News media really need to look into what they can do to offer spectrum for a non-excessive price. "Spotify for news" could be a way, or (they surely would not want to sell out to a platform taking control of everything money!) wide spectrum syndication networks ("subscription at x includes guest pass options at y, z, a and b"). The challenge is getting all that not only across the opinion spectrum, but also across borders because that's how much we are spoiled.
  • coremoff 2y ago
    I like your idea of spotify for news; it's quite similar in idea to the "If YouTube had actual channels" from yesterday [1]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247023
  • _fat_santa 2y ago
    Another issue with news is syndication, that is multiple outlets running the same story. If I want to watch Peeky Blinders then I have to go to Netflix, if I want to watch Game of Thrones I have to go to HBO, there is no (legal) alternative. But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article", I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic, and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which require no subscription so I just go to one of those.
  • _fat_santa 2y ago
    Another issue with news is syndication, that is multiple outlets running the same story. If I want to watch Peeky Blinders then I have to go to Netflix, if I want to watch Game of Thrones I have to go to HBO, there is no (legal) alternative. But say there is some piece of breaking news and I click on a NYT article and get a "please subscribe to read this article", I might be tempted if they were the only ones running the article but I can just go to google news, search for the topic, and find 10 other outlets running the same story, 5 of which require no subscription so I just go to one of those.
• physicsguy 2y ago
  I think one thing people are missing the point on is that it's quite addictive to have live up to date news. Twitter is constantly debating the latest talking point, you can get instant notifications. But it's actually quite exhausting after a while, you're no better off knowing something minutes after it happened when all the analysis is very shallow because nobody's had time to look at the bigger picture around an event. I've been trying to digital detox a bit and I've found it's quite enjoyable switching off from a lot of that and buying a newspaper on a Saturday. I usually either pick The Observer (weekend version of The Guardian) or The Times.
• Johanx64 2y ago
  Because you don't need "news". What do you need "news" for? To do what with it exactly? Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of benefitial way to you? What's the signal to noise ratio? The answer of course is no, none of it is actionable, and almost all of it is garbage and noise. This would be mostly true even for highly accurate news and high quality reporting. And if the information was valuable, it wouldn't be called "news" to begin with.
  • cccybernetic 2y ago
    I haven't seen it framed this way, but yeah - well put.
  • pnut 2y ago
    I say this as a person who does not follow news, after a decades long news addiction. In its absence, there is no accountability pressure for any individual or organisational actor. It doesn't matter whether I as an individual know what's going on, nothing I can do anyway, but history is overflowing with societal change being forced to the surface through public scrutiny. All kinds of horrible things happen when nobody has to look over their shoulder to see who's watching, and very obviously, the legal system is designed only to address escalations, not to generate them.
    • 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
      This is the modern justification of the news given in the 60s, but it ignores all the harm the news does too. For most of the existence of news media, they have been weapons used to push political or ideological themes by the people who could afford to fund them. It should still be possible for us to have public accountability without a sports and entertainment section. The funding for and publication of investigative journalism is definitely important, but we have not yet found a good model for it yet.
  • openrisk 2y ago
    Not sure what is your definition of "news" but sticking to the common generic usage of the term this comes as an incredibly thick stance. There is a vast universe of information that is collected and reported by the news industry: from global news on wars, pandemics, disasters, to business / market / technology news, to political news, all the way to local news. All them are "actionable" one way or an other, although not in the same way for everyone. Biases and varying signal to noise ratios are real, but your remedy is akin to choping off your head because you have a headache.
• aszantu 2y ago
  personal opinion: the world feels orchestrated, the only thing the news are good for right now is the latest jumpscare/world ending scare, then buy the stock that's probably gonna go up. And I can get that info from the memes. example: monkeypox, WHO issued a new scare -> bought some stock that makes mpox vaccine, that went up 10%, only question now would be: when do I sell? Preferably watch what the WHO is saying about the issue next time, then sell if they call it off
• jillesvangurp 2y ago
  The simple answer is that the free baseline news is actually pretty decent and individual news outlets tend to overcharge for something that is of marginal value. With very few exceptions (like the NYT), quality is universally very low, journalists are underpaid, etc. What's missing in the market is a Netflix like subscription model where you don't have to cherry pick one or a handful out of hundreds/thousands of news outlets and instead just get access to everything. That's worth a few dollars per month to me but since nobody seems willing to build that platform, the money stays in my pocket. I haven't bought a news paper in well over a decade. I use an ad blocker. And I'm pretty well informed. Usually, I have no shortage of stuff to read that is interesting and high quality. And it doesn't help that paywalls are easily bypassed. I sometimes read articles behind paywalls via the usual means of archived web pages. And honestly, mostly I don't feel like I'm missing out on a lot of good content. Mostly that stuff just echos what you can read for free elsewhere or is just stating the bleedingly obvious. Worse, some of that paid content seems aimed at people that don't have a lot of time or attention span; so we're talking very short articles without a lot of depth or substance. E.g. Bloomberg seems to peddle a lot of that. I appreciate that people exist that need that. But that's not me. The opposite also seems popular: excruciatingly long form articles with a low signal to noise ratio and lengthy descriptions of the journalist's feelings about it all. There's a lot of filler content like that. Not worth paying for either as far as I'm concerned. The reality is both free and paid news sources tap the same sources of actual news. Competition for bringing actual news is fierce and it's rare for exclusive reporting to stay exclusive for more than a few minutes. The value of paying for early access is minimal. Most of these paid outlets are of course owned by big media corporations who are more busy creating share holder value than paying their journalists or investing in the quality they pretend to deliver. The irony is that if they had some platform they could share subscription revenue on, they might have something that's worth a lot more than the sum of each of their crumbling little news empires. But greed seems to get in the way for this.
• instagraham 2y ago
  Slightly related to topic but I like how the comments are on a column to the right of the post. The tendency of many news outlets to shut down their comment sections has taken out the discourse.
  • dredmorbius 2y ago
    The site is a Diaspora* pod: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)> It's got its plusses and minuses. Presentation, however, is pretty good.
• ccozan 2y ago
  In many european countries we pay already for news ( the TV tax ). In Germany is pretty hefty ( ~150 euro per year afaik ).
• hcfman 2y ago
  They are expensive. There's no one news source to rule them all, so you would have to buy about 5 subscriptions just for the news of one small country, that's hellishly expensive. If for example, all of the newspapers in the netherlands could be had for say 7 euros a month I would likely be a subscriber. Are they suggesting that that would not be enough to survive on ?
  • hcfman 2y ago
    And better yet, would they suggest that not doing that and having more than that price for just a single paper works out better for them?
• AndyMcConachie 2y ago
  I pay for more news now than I ever have in my entire life. Most of through Patreon. I pay for podcasts. I pay directly to journalists. I pay directly to independent news organizations. I buy books written by journalists. What I don't pay for is 'traditional media'. I don't consume any news behind a paywall other than the few rare 'extras' I get through patreon.com. My ability to access information has never been better and I don't mind paying the actual journalists who do the work.
• _Algernon_ 2y ago
  News is propaganda[1]. Why would I pay to be force-fed propaganda? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
  • cchi_co 2y ago
    Media can have biases or agendas, actively engaging with multiple sources and critically evaluating the information is the key to mitigate the influence of propaganda
    • _Algernon_ 2y ago
      The point of the propaganda model is that the filters equally affect any media corporation. It is a question of incentives, not political affiliation. Diversification of news consumption doesn't solve the issues of ownership, advertising funding, sourcing of news, etc.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• openrisk 2y ago
  The problem is that news organizations didn't just get disrupted by digitization (more specifically the adtech innovation), they got disrupted without replacement. In an era of rent-seeking digital business models, where trillion dollar digital oligopolies have become the only viable option to operate in the economy, nobody wants to do the hard work of news collection, processing and dissemination with its rather precarious economics. Adding insult to injury "AI" threatens to squeeze the last drop of blood left. This slow motion disruption (with uncertain and ugly end-states) plagues most other industries that deal heavily with information (finance, insurance etc.), more or less for the same reasons: digital illiteracy of management, short-termism and complacency from protected market silos etc. There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that drives the entire digital universe. One can imagine a combination of "newstech" and "banktech" [1] and many other "industry-techs" that collectively reflect more accurately all the diverse services people need. What would a fit-for-purpose "newstech" platform look like? There are plenty of well-remunerated execs whose job is to figure it out. Free hint: open source software will eat the world. [1] Not everybody in the information spreading business is a digital laggard. Bloomberg built an empire on his early incarnation of "trader-tech" - but this is more an exception confirming the rule.
  • heresie-dabord 2y ago
    > There is no valid reason why "adtech" is the thing that drives the entire digital universe. Every phrase that is conveyed/transmitted must be paid for somehow. If not state-funded, journalism must find funding that scales to cover the production costs. Advertising money is (a) abundant and (b) seeks the broadest possible delivery. The WWW (e.g. browsers, WWWtech) is an optimal match for ad money. For decades before, Advertisers and Journalism maintained one another in a state of equilibrium. Journalism cultivated an audience and was gatekeeper of what was "printable" (tolerable to its paying audience); Advertisers were gatekeepers of marketing gimmicks and brand reputation. These two tensions were complementary. An audience with education and money to spend represented value to journalism; the audience, together with advertising, paid the salaries, business costs, and legal fees of journalism. QED. But then came WWWtech, which gave Advertisers everything the latter ever wanted: access to motivated spenders, day and night, all the time, everywhere. WWW ads are relatively cheap to produce and fast to market; WWWtech provides a deluge of fascinating facts about the market. Journalism was jilted. So it reworked its channels. But good journalism is important to Democracy. People care about their communities, voters do need factual information. There should be astute, principled, critical evaluation of social and economic events, of government policies and corporate activities. Today, the only ways journalism is surviving (hardly) are through i) funding by the state and subscribers, or ii) by consolidating journalistic brands to deliver monetisable content that is unhitched from stabilising principles. State funding has risks but may be the most effective option. Otherwise, we see that Anything Goes, as Cole Porter said. Now the citizens of Democracy itself are struggling to understand why peace, order, good government, and factual information are so hard.
• mort96 2y ago
  I'm drowning in news everywhere I look, paying to see even more seems weird
  • margalabargala 2y ago
    Is what you're drowning in news, though? Or is it something else, masquerading as news?
• mikhael28 2y ago
  Why would I pay for news when I have HN?
• CM30 2y ago
  Practically speaking, because there's no need to, at least for 99% of the population. Any relevant information you can think of will probably get covered by a few hundred/thousand independent sites for free, or posted on social media, or covered in videos on sites like YouTube, etc. And that's kinda the internet's thing. Any market that was based on information has now seen the bottom fall out of it, since anyone can compete with anyone else when it comes to providing/giving away said information. Probably also doesn't help that a lot of the other things news outlets used to be able to capitalise on (classified ads, comic strips, sports scores, etc) have now been debundled and can be found on numerous other websites that only provide that service. Either way, while a lot of people will blame Google/Facebook/eBay/Amazon/Sinclair/whatever for the situation, the honest answer is that traditional news coverage is simply because financially non viable as a product. At best, you'll get a small audience that wants something specialist and will pay for it, but that'll never be the majority of the population.
  • cchi_co 2y ago
    [dead]
    • spintin 2y ago
      [dead]
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• lwl71xydb23 2y ago
  [dead]
• rnts08 2y ago
  If news were 100% neutral and delivered without ads/product placements and could be 100% trusted, I'm sure there are people who would pay for it. "News" as it is presented today is not a "product" that anyone should pay for.
  • carlosjobim 2y ago
    Just like people would pay for art if paintings were 100% beautiful and 100% meaningful. And pay for music if a song was 100% good.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  There's nothing that's more expensive than free.
• elif 2y ago
  Personally, I feel like the editors and writers get enough value from me through their shaping and framing of how stories are presented to me. Whether through blatant advertisers or just simple ideological dissemination, the real price is my sympathy to the exact verbiage that the writer desires to present to me. It is already enough of a chore filtering through all the different bias to find ground reality. Paying for one that 'i like' is just succumbing to that editors worldview.
  • ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    So you pay them in exposure?
• simianparrot 2y ago
  Because I have to do most of the job for the "journalists" when reading their pieces, because they rarely if ever mention sources, rarely ask good questions to interviewees, and more often than not are _factually incorrect_ whenever I fact check them. After repeatedly catching all manner of journalists writing complete garbage about topics I am knowledgeable about, I have been fighting against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect by checking everything. Turns out most of it is just as bad. Why would I pay for that?
  • d_k_h 2y ago
    There is a general quality issue. Do they even use editors any more? the bad writing alone should be embarrassing.
• hacsky 2y ago
  Why would i pay for gossip?
• AstroJetson 2y ago
  I would be very happy to pay for news. IF YOU THEN DIDN'T TRACK THE FUCK OUT OF ME. I don't want to start looking at "Democrat" adds when I click on a Biden Article. I don't want to see adds for the "Republicans" when I click on a Trump Article. Lather, rinse, repeat for Olympics, local news, world news, cricket, etc. So to stop targeting, I don't log in. Figure out how to take donations, I'll send you money. I got my local PBS station into this.
• iambateman 2y ago
  Because I get all the news I want for free... It's really as simple as that.
• redmattred 2y ago
  It's not valuable enough for them personally to want to pay for it.
• bernardlunn 2y ago
  Scanning headlines is free and enough for me
• charles_f 2y ago
  I don't read news (and then don't pay for it) because of the detrimental effect it had on my mental health when I did. Some people see that as egotistical, but I'm just too anxious already to allow other people to inject me with new and exciting ways to stress about the future.
  • JKCalhoun 2y ago
    It's normal to be anxious about horrible things in the world that you are (seemingly, and probably) powerless to do anything about.
• gcatalfamo 2y ago
  I will pay for news when people competent on the different matters will be writing them.
• 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
  Why would I pay for something that is actively working against my interests? I'm with Bryan Caplan's position that most of the news can be safely eliminated from one's consumption with zero loss to one's quality of life: https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.h... Of course there is still a question of how one would support quality investigative journalism and someone to hold the powers that be accountable, although one wonders how much the news have been truly doing that in the recent years, as opposed to being a mere extension of a political party.
  • maldusiecle 2y ago
    Which do you think is cheaper to produce, agitprop or deep investigative reporting? If no one pays for news, which do you think will grow in proportion to the other?
    • ok123456 2y ago
      What is passed off as "deep investigative reporting" is actually agitprop, especially when reporters interface with and are concerned with maintaining access to the national security apparatus. Yet, at the same time, the same journalists think they're "defending democracy from darkness." I have no interest in funding that mind poison.
      • Aunche 2y ago
        I hate that propaganda has become a thought-terminating cliche. First of all, it's not necessarily a bad thing. "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II. Also, just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism from that publication like the Washington Post's opioid database.
        • ok123456 2y ago
          > "Agitprop" is literally what brought the deeply isolationist Americans to finally act in World War II. I thought it was Pearl Harbor. >just because you suspect that some journalism from a publication is propaganda doesn't invalidate the usefulness of all journalism Usefulness for whom? If by useful you mean to manufacture consent to do whatever businesses and governments would have done if it weren't for the pesky public getting in their way, then yes, sure. We wouldn't have had the second Iraq war, or the first for that matter, if it weren't for the hard work of the journalists at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal.
• bithive123 2y ago
  The "news" is never "new". There is nothing in the news that people haven't been doing to each other for thousands of years. Some people complain that Hollywood just keeps making the same movies, but they'll watch the same news for their entire lives.
  • high_na_euv 2y ago
    >The "news" is never "new". There is nothing in the news that people haven't been doing to each other for thousands of years. Huh? You can easily name the news that literally never happened before e.g innovation and tech
  • wang_li 2y ago
    Me reading in the news that for the eighth year in a row the city has come in on budget, crime is low, and school achievement is up is great and I enjoy it. Because it affects my life directly. The value of news, repetitious or otherwise, is that it's part of the feedback loop of governance.
• spking 2y ago
  I’ve been a paid subscriber to County Highway for over a year now and can’t tell you how nice it is to sit down with a coffee and read the paper every once in a while. https://countyhighway.com/about https://countyhighway.com/about
• rambojohnson 2y ago
  why would I pay for a narrative?
• wdotica 2y ago
  For a few years I subscribed to my city's newspaper, because I figured that what I want is a reliable source of local news and not just national news, which I can get anywhere. What I found was that Twitter/X accounts and free news websites peppered with ads were better even for that purpose! The paper I subscribed to would have the front page "news" be a huge history report about some local curiosity (an old prison, or a long-dead civil rights activist, or an industry that no longer exists). However, if I wanted to know information about the local Family Court judge candidates, or why a bridge is closed, or why a protest is happening on a certain street, I'd need to go online anyway. Oftentimes a local TV reporter's Twitter account could give me up to the minute information. The newspaper was not only too slow, oftentimes they wouldn't even bother to cover the interesting event!
• rebeccaskinner 2y ago
  The main issue for me is that I'm going to do everything possible to avoid ads (and tracking) in my life, especially if it's something I'm paying for. There isn't, to my knowledge, a single mainstream news source that offers an ad-and-tracking free subscription.
• colordrops 2y ago
  Because they are all biased propaganda one way or the other and are working for someone else's interests, not mine as the subscriber.
• reylas 2y ago
  I would pay for news, I won't pay for opinions.
• mediumsmart 2y ago
  Why do some people pay for news? I don’t know but we could ask them.
• bhelkey 2y ago
  In depth investigation could better reward the original publication. If news site 'A' spends a year investigating a piece, five minutes after they publish, news site 'B' can summarize their findings. Why subscribe to 'A' when 'B' is cheaper? It costs a lot less to summarize good journalism than it does to do good journalism. With paper news, the news service that breaks the story gets a day of exclusivity. Perhaps half a day of exclusivity with evening editions.
• j45 2y ago
  My guess is the news you like might not be reaching you. It's kind of like how youtube can become more interesting as a tv experience than cable tv.
• ta8645 2y ago
  After a decade of imbibing the national news every day, I just stopped cold turkey. It never informed a single decision I made in my everyday life. At best, it amounted to gossip and entertainment. At worst, it made my life much worse with negativity and an exaggerated sense of danger and impending doom.
• GnarfGnarf 2y ago
  I would love to subscribe to a syndicate that accumulated micropayments for each article I choose to read, then charged my credit card one lump sum at the end of the month. I don't want subscriptions to specific newspapers. There are not enough hours in the month to take advantage of all of them.
• lkbm 2y ago
  Are there newspapers that: 1. Don't dox private individuals for no good reason (rules out NYT, Washington Post, and Forbes) 2. Have ethical business practices around a subscriptions, such as letting you cancel easily? (Rules out the thousands of local papers owned by USA Today) 3. Have basic fact-checking (rules out...almost everything?) ProPublica seems like the best, especially since I consider investigative journalism extremely important. I've heard good things about Bloomberg, but it's extremely expensive. The Atlantic and The Economist have traditionally had pretty good content, and I at least haven't noticed them violating basic journalistic or business ethics.
  • dingnuts 2y ago
    fact checking is always so ideologically fraught (which is why it rules out everyone) that I have given up and instead just try to hear every narrative. They aren't of equal weight, of course, but it's good for unpassionate understanding of the different warring perspectives. A great place to start, IMHO, is allsides.com and an RSS reader.
  • kkylin 2y ago
    I really like the Financial Times. It was a breath of fresh air compared to other newspapers. If nothing else, I liked the tone: matter of fact, no drama. But it's (i) not cheap; and (ii) canceling was a bit harder than subscribing. (I found I wasn't reading it enough to justify the cost. Subscribing was easy but canceling required a phone call -- bit of unnecessary but understandable friction.)
  • yawgmoth 2y ago
    Yes, there are regional papers that don't often cover large stories that achieve your criteria. At least there are a couple I can think of, LGBT papers in particular.
• Eric_WVGG 2y ago
  > Broad subscription to newspapers was a brief and exceptional phenomenon. But people weren't even paying for the news back then! That $.25 for the daily newspaper didn't even cover printing and distribution of the paper it was printed on. The price was just a filter to separate consumers who actually wanted the product vs those who would use it as fuel to insulate or heat their homes. Advertisers paid for the news. They always have. The difference between now and "the old days" — what put news into a crisis — is that they used to sell their own ads. When the Internet came along, they abdicated that control to ad networks, which eventually consolidated to Google and Meta, and are now confused by the fact that they're only getting ten cents on the dollar.
  • CoastalCoder 2y ago
    My brother used to be a reporter and editor. IIRC, he said Craigslist killing classified ads did major violence to papers' finances.
    • Eric_WVGG 2y ago
      Absolutely. I was working at a newspaper when it got started. This is a near-verbatim conversation I had with our publisher: “Hey John, I was wondering about our classifieds revenue. How much of our money comes in from that vs. display ads?" [those are the designed ads with photos and graphics etc.] “Almost exactly half. Like 49-51% depending on the month. Why?” “Well I was talking to some guys from the SF Weekly, apparently there’s this guy out there named Craig…” I explained that there was nothing stopping "Craig" from cloning his site in every market, and developed a clone that we could license to other papers around the country before Craigslist could get traction. Unfortunately, a new publisher came in, and when he got word of my project, axed the entire operation — “This would destroy our classified ads revenue!” Years later, Steve Jobs said that he was happy to “cannibalize” iPod sales with the new iPhone. Really wish I had the wits to explain that as well back then.
• indigo0086 2y ago
  I just listen to No Agenda, a veritable news source by composting most news sources.
• d_k_h 2y ago
  Micropayments can work. They have to be micropayments though. That means show me the headline, a brief synopsis, and if I want to read the full article I pay a few fractions of a cent. The problem is that most services want to make a killing without doing any real work. Automated ad feeds, new services etc without any internal reporting doesn't provide a service that people want or need. Also, people are not going buy dozens and dozens of services at $5/month to $20/month each. Even a buck a month is too much when you get beyond a certain point.
• _moof 2y ago
  I would happily pay for the BBC but they don't want my money. The problem isn't that people won't pay for news. It's that we won't pay for "news."
• RIMR 2y ago
  Because I don't read one single outlet, I need to read many to understand what is happening, and subscribing to many different outlets is expensive. So I just paste the links into incognito mode, or 12ft, or Archive.org, and I read it for free. Then I use the money to buy other things that I actually want.
• jiveturkey 2y ago
  For me, it's (K) alone. The quality of news via subscription (news+) is atrocious, as required to monetize. I am a sometimes subscriber to The Economist and I listen to BBC and KQED daily. I also like Al Jazeera. I do read some news sources like South China Morning Post and National Review when I want to understand propaganda. There are some decent youtube news shows but I've not watched enough to know which are good. I wish the article had gone into comedy news as really ushered in by Jon Stewart.
• egberts1 2y ago
  Until the news(paper) offers something of tangible values like classified, public notices, comic, and LOCAL advertising, the news isn't then worth buying. And coupled with pretty poor coverages of "journalism", there is pretty-near zero incentive to buy just only the news.
• e-clinton 2y ago
  I won’t pay because I find it too expensive. Publications want hundreds of dollars a year for access when in reality all I want is to read a handful of articles per month if that. How about you charge me per article up to a monthly max? No, everyone wants to sell you a subscription. Apple News is a good idea, but I’d still rather pay per article.
• FactKnower69 2y ago
  >The Stasi and SS would have committed genocide for such data. (And did. With IBM's aid and support.) I'm fucking sorry? How many millions did the stasi genocide again? Everyone knows that IBM provided infrastructure that facilitated the Holocaust, so which other genocide are you equating with the Holocaust here exactly? Insanely disrespectful thing to post
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
  I consider the news to be like an infinite TV show with rich, unpredictable plots, no agenda, and, as an added bonus, kinda realistic. Apart from being good entertainment, I owe all my capital to following the news, and it has also saved my ass a couple of times when situations were about to get dangerous.
• sourcecodeplz 2y ago
  IMHO You read the news to have something new to talk about with friends/family you meet often.
• kazinator 2y ago
  The main reason is that there is a glut of free news, or quasi free (ad sponsored). Also, some people get nonfree news as part of some streaming package. They are not paying for news per se, but it's there and they consume it from time to time, even if not avidly. You can consume free news via the radio also (which people mainly do in their car these days, I suspect). During the heyday of television, people consumed free news via broadcast TV which you could catch with an antenna. A few people probably still do. There has hardly ever been a need to pay for news since the dawn of the radio era.
• t0bia_s 2y ago
  Our government wants to tax public media even though you not consume them. Considering how propagandistic and low quality broadcast of our public media are, this proof that their audience rapidly fell down (especially after 2020-21) and they are in financial crisis.
• leoh 2y ago
  Hypothesis: many HN users would pay $1 to read a WSJ, FT, or Information article.
• sevensor 2y ago
  Certainly (A) for me. The news that matters is local, but my local paper got purchased by McClatchey, shut down its press, cut staff to the bone, and started publishing ads that pretend to be editorial content. That last was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I cancelled my subscription.
• cafard 2y ago
  Forty years ago, one wasn't paying that much for it, directly. The newspapers were supported largely by advertising. But the ads have gone online, and the subscribers pay more for less. (And advertising killed liberal democracy? How? Was it my group house running a classified for a new housemate? Was it [defunct department store] advertising its Presidents Day sales?)