11 ms·

The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as we

• harimau777 1y ago
  [flagged]
  • gotoeleven 1y ago
    The article here is about bad faith left wing arguments. Presumably you'd pay for those I guess?
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • harimau777 1y ago
      No. What I would pay for is good faith left wing arguments.
• hamhock666 1y ago
  Don't people already pay for things like the NYT? I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
  • Onavo 1y ago
    NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
    • thaumasiotes 1y ago
      > NYT is an exception > The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. How is the NYT an exception?
      • insane_dreamer 1y ago
        a large paid subscription base
        • thaumasiotes 1y ago
          That's no different from the other papers and magazines. Paid subscriptions have never been a significant source of revenue to newspapers. They relied on advertisements, just like the websites that killed them.
          • eddythompson80 1y ago
            That's not entirely true for NYT as OP mentioned. NYT is 170 years old. They have been through many phases and models. Luckily NYT is a public company and you can look up their revenue split on the SEC website going back to 1994. In 1994 they had 35% revenue from circulation vs 65% from ads. In 2021 it was 24% ads and 68% subscribers and 8% "Other"
            • thaumasiotes 1y ago
              The Washington Post is also a public company (before 2013). In their 2009 filing, they state that the newspaper's revenue (in 2008) was 51% ads, with the other 49% not attributed. At that time operating expenses exceeded revenues by 25 million dollars, though this was not an immediate problem for them because they owned several other more profitable companies. By contrast, in that same year the New York Times announced that they had managed to stave off insolvency by securing a large personal loan from Carlos Slim, who went on to become their biggest shareholder. How are we distinguishing between these two newspapers? What's supposed to be "exceptional" about the New York Times?
  • bboygravity 1y ago
    It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda. I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?
    • IggleSniggle 1y ago
      It's a form of tithing. You give to the propagandists providing the slant you align with, even if they're wealthy billionaires. It's been common for belief communities for centuries. Poor people do it for access to wealthy individuals or as a form of gambling on the promises of the propaganda, and wealthy individuals, when they give, are also doing so for influence (access to poor people en masse). Its propaganda all the way down.
      • llbbdd 1y ago
        It's just called exchanging money for goods and services. When did HN contract reddit's obsession with billionaires in every thread?
    • echelon_musk 1y ago
      It's depressing to see the paper that once had the courage to publish the Pentagon Papers seen as publishing political propaganda. What alternative revenue incentive do you see that could support independent journalism?
      • chasd00 1y ago
        Don’t take it too seriously. NYT reporting contrary to the reader’s politics = propaganda/shilling. NYT reporting in line with the reader’s politics = hard hitting journalism speaking truth to power.
      • pegasus 1y ago
        You think nobody accused the NYT of propaganda during the Pentagon Papers years? Or ultimately, any other publication during any other period? What's new?
  • Telemakhos 1y ago
    Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media-layoffs https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media... The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.
    • pegasus 1y ago
      If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.
  • Symmetry 1y ago
    Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.
• lanfeust6 1y ago
  I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
  • Animats 1y ago
    > I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks. The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for. Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works. The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads. There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
    • lanfeust6 1y ago
      Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.
    • setopt 1y ago
      I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman. I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
      • 1y ago
• bobsmooth 1y ago
  >Would people pay for real journalism? See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
  • piva00 1y ago
    The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable. All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue. Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      > The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
      • CWuestefeld 1y ago
        One big difference there is that for the vast majority of people, they can get the vast majority of their music or video content from that single service (or at worst a small number of them). But for reading news articles, there's a LOT of diversification. It's nowhere near one-stop shopping. In fact, a responsible reader ought to want to diversify points of view to avoid bubbles. Of course, that doesn't eliminate the possibility of an industry consortium allowing a reader to pay into a single pool and read content from many sources, with payment distributed in some equitable manner.
• firecall 1y ago
  Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media. You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sfti1# https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf... Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do. You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
  • adamc 1y ago
    "You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight." I have literally never seen this. In the US?
    • arl79 1y ago
      In Europe for instance
  • CWuestefeld 1y ago
    You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.
  • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
• blisster138 1y ago
  Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.
• chiffre01 1y ago
  Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.
• Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests. [0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/ https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
  • Zefiroj 1y ago
    > But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc. and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.