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

https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/867c94d0ba87013aca41448a5b29e257

by dredmorbius • 2 years ago

168 546 2 years ago

diaspora.glasswings.com

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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> (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/traditi...>.

- My "short reading list" is available via archive: <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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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...)

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Year of the NYT paywall was 2020, my "TK-year" note above not having been caught by me before the edit window closed.

slavik81• 2 years ago

I quite lite The Economist, but the cost has been increasing quite significantly. It's now 429 CAD/yr for a print subscription. I don't have time to read every issue, so it's getting difficult to justify renewing.

57FkMytWjyFu• 2 years ago

When I realized how many news stories were paid placements, I refused to be billed to read them.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest reducing their incidence?

lunarmony• 2 years ago

multi-tier payment structures (subscription + ads + paid placements) are very common for most news industry players..

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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.

sooheon6• 2 years 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?

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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>.

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....>.

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.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>

2. Flood, earthquake, major storm, other natural disaster, major industrial risks such as nuclear power plants, and the like.

jmclnx5• 2 years 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.

bachmeier2• 2 years 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.

jmclnx5• 2 years 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.

anon-39882• 2 years ago

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?

uHH...yes?? Hello? We used to pay $1 every day to buy newsPAPERs? Remember? Does this stuff being on the internet suddenly makes journalism a free labor or something?

listenallyall4• 2 years ago

Funny to see people publicly out themselves as too cheap to become informed.

The currency that is limited is not money, it is time. When news is presented digitally, it's just one more thing on your always-connected screen competing for your attention with every other website, app, video, etc. With a physical newspaper, you actually (most days) carve out the time to peruse it front page to back. Of course some days its a quick glance while other days you read every article. But the physical-ness of a newspaper somehow elevates it's priority and commands your time, in a way a digital version simply cannot.

svachalek2• 2 years ago

You used to be able to have them put real ink on real paper and deliver multiple pounds of it to your doorstep for less than they want to charge for the bits now. It's like in the 90s banks wanted you to pay extra to use the ATM. It saved them from having the office open and hiring tellers but they wanted to charge you for the "convenience" of using the machine.

Schiendelman2• 2 years ago

Sure, none of the people involved in that had healthcare.

drewcoo• 2 years ago

Those newspapers made most of their money through ads. Most of what people paid was their attention, not their money.

shiroiushi5• 2 years ago

Exactly, that's the thing people keep missing in these discussions. That $0.25 for your newsstand paper didn't pay for the costs of paying reporters and journalists; it really only paid for distribution and maybe printing costs (e.g., a lot of that quarter went to the local newsstand, not the newspaper). These days, distribution costs are pretty close to zero since they don't need printing presses, trucks to drive papers around, newsstands, and all the people to staff this machinery. They do need IT personnel and some servers, but the per-viewer cost there is much less. Newspapers got the bulk of their funding from advertising back then, so readers' expectations haven't really changed that much, the newspapers have simply gotten much worse at funding themselves with ads.

input_sh• 2 years ago

One crucial difference is that you could walk up to a newsstand and buy an issue whenever you felt like it.

Online, there's very other options that don't include a perpetual agreement.

xp84• 2 years ago

This is so true. I'd anonymously pump 50 cents into those paywalls on a daily basis if that were a way to gain access to an article, but the only online option any newspaper or magazine I know of provides is an auto-renewing subscription of $5-10 a month, with the deal being a bit better if you go annual. Problem is, there are like 6,000 newspapers and magazines in the country whose articles I might stumble upon and like to read. No, I'm not subscribing to the Akron Times, the San Diego Tribune, and the Boston Herald just because someone linked me an article from each today.

darth_avocado• 2 years 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.

physicsguy2• 2 years ago

Depends what it is; some of the print newspapers in the UK have moved to online subscription. It worked for the 'premium' ones with longform articles, it has not worked for the 'red top' newspapers, and they've gone back to ad-supported models and have enormously declined in quality of journalism.

KerryJones2• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

See "The closest I’ve come to a solution" in TFA.

Thoughts?

svachalek2• 2 years 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.

johnea2• 2 years ago

I agree. I scan about 30 websites for news each day.

Do I need to subscrible to all of them?

Just not practical...

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Exactly.

I'd made this point a bit over a year ago with regards to Hacker News, based on my own work scraping a full history of Front Page views from the "past" archive.

Note that there are only 30 stories which make the front page per day, total submissions run somewhat higher, typically a bit over 100, and about 400,000 per year per research by Whaly.[1]

As of 21 June 2023, there were 52,642 distinct sites submitted to the front page.

Counting those with 100 or more appearances, that falls to 149.

Doing a manual classification of news sites, there are 146.

Even at a modest annual subscription rate of $50/year ($1/week per source), that's a $7,300 subscriptions budget just to be able to discuss what's appearing on Hacker News from mainstream news sources.

Oh, and if you want per-article access at, say, $0.50 per article, that's $5,475 to read a year's worth of HN front-page submissions (10,950 articles/year), and that is just based on what is captured on the archive. In practice far more articles will appear, if only briefly, on the front page each day.

Which is among the reasons I find the "just subscribe" argument untenable. Some sort of bundling payment arrangement is required.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36832354>

________________________________

Notes:

1. "A Year on Hacker News" (2022) <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>

paradox4602• 2 years ago

Is grounded still around? Because that's what they offered.

For me I find skipping the daily hystronic news cycle is better for my health. Anything of significant enough import would get to me via social channels, at which point I can go find enough sources about a subject to get a proper nuanced view

SkyPuncher• 2 years ago

Yes, I see them advertised by a few YouTube content creators

jabroni_salad• 2 years ago

It doesn't even need to be everything. to be honest I'm not really interested in paying for current events from any outlet, as I am simply not a news junkie, but if I could get some kinda combo deal for the publications that are frequent fliers in Sunday Longreads I would go for it.

In the olden days papers would target people like me who only occasionally read news with good headlines on the front and a low price for that day's print run. Now they are asking for a subscription (which is too much to pay for a single article) and acting like the archival value add is worth it to me (it isnt).

oceanplexian• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Some countries provide government funded news that is of reasonable quality, for example abc.net.au/news

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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>

atrus2• 2 years 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.

gottorf11• 2 years ago

A lot of the badness of news comes from requiring a profit and where that profit comes from.

The same badness will happen in a taxpayer-funded organization. After all, someone is still writing the checks, and coverage will be biased towards that someone. I'd rather there not be an official merger of the government and media that now will have an explicit incentive to paint a pretty picture of the government.

The bias that an independently funded, for-profit media may have towards its funders does not scare me nearly as much as the alternative.

next_xibalba• 2 years ago

Not sure I agree. NPR, a nonprofit, has followed Fox News, NYT, MSNBC, etc down the biased, slanted drain hole. I listened to NPR from my childhood until a few years ago before I, sadly, had to call it quits.

eltoxo2• 2 years ago

I don't see how it really matters. A bigger issue is that some days there is just going to be nothing to report if you want "real" news.

"Today nothing happened, the end" would not work. So you would have to lower your standards for that day. On that day you would conflate what happened with entertainment and low and behold that day nothing actually happened is more popular than reality.

Loop this process over and over and we get what we have now.

I suspect we end up at the point we are at now no matter what the initial starting conditions or how you design the system.

"News" is a form of entertainment and to pretend it is not seems completely delusional to me.

I think it is like asking how do you get people to watch a movie of a professor giving a statistics lecture. You have to publicly fund it because no one is going to really watch or pay for that movie.

Yodel0914• 2 years ago

Australia's taxpayer-funded news [0], while maybe not as bad as some commercial news sites, is still terrible. Clickbait headlines, lack of editing, lets-just-repeat-a-bunch-of-tweets-and-call-it-an-article etc.

Last year I paid for a subscription to one of the independent sources of news here [1], but haven't made use of it because, honestly, news is pointless. I find it mostly makes me upset about things that are completely out of my control. It doesn't change my behaviour in any positive way.

I did consider continuing my subscription, just because "independent journalism" is a societal good, even if I don't consume it. But then it is in direct competition with other charities that I could donate to.

0: https://www.abc.net.au/news 1: https://crikey.com.au

johnea2• 2 years ago

BBC is pretty good, as well as NPR.

News companies are mostly collapsing. The only viable way to keep in private hands might be the Guardian model, of a trust established in it's name.

Bozo could certainly afford to do that for the Wash Post, instead they're leading the race to the bottom with firings and more for-profit articles.

gottorf11• 2 years ago

I don't know, Uri Berliner's critique of NPR was pretty spot-on, at least from n=1 of this former longtime listener. I found it increasingly difficult to stomach the lopsided coverage that no longer stuck to just the facts, but rather what to think and how to feel about them.

AlbertCory3• 2 years ago

Neither of your comparisons is true, as I've detailed elsewhere in this thread.

glial2• 2 years ago

Ideally, governments solve problems that are important but that society can't figure out how to solve in other ways. The questions for us are then:

- is it important that voting citizens are informed about various issues?

- is the market (or some other mechanism) currently meeting this need?

Schiendelman2• 2 years ago

And: - would implementing "news" change the level of informedness?

I don't think we can assume it would.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

What's your alternative?

Are there specific parts of my diagnosis or etiology you specifically disagree with? Which?

dinkblam• 2 years ago

i want to pay for reuters but they won't let me. no option to turn off the ads in exchange for payments..

apercu4• 2 years ago

I mean, the shareholders.... think of them....

fibonachos• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

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

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.

gottorf11• 2 years 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.

madrox3• 2 years 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)

paradox4602• 2 years 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

calvinmorrison• 2 years ago

driving

get bored

remember I have a radio

turn on NPR

in this episode we're going to investigate the relationship between consensual undocumented migrant men and underage boys who want to seem older, on this hour of the Latino story hour

click

repeat every 4-6 months

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

NPR does a fabulous job not sounding like CNN or Fox News with their breathlessness. Sure like 1 in 100 stories from them would be meh, but I use them and APNews as my primary source and it doesn’t feel like a panic attack when I go to their pages as compared to most mainstream news.

nomel2• 2 years ago

Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.

I think it would be very difficult to set rigor (truth?) standards. There's a long history of truths that directly conflict with the "facts" provided, especially those from governments, which could probably not be reported under such scrutiny. I'm also curious how lying by omissions, which is the biggest problem I perceive, would be handled.

deepsun2• 2 years ago

What if we start prosecuting for knowingly spreading misinformation? It already works, but only in licensed areas like healthcare and legal advice (although I think we could do more on health advice side). We could make more areas like that.

And fines to be small, similar to copyrighted media content sharing -- those who did initial leak would get large fines, those who just re-shared -- slap on the hand.

Veserv• 2 years ago

I always propose the: “Technically, your honor…” standard. If you make a commercial statement and in court your defense is “Technically, your honor, it means something completely different than what anybody hearing it would think and I spent a bunch of time in focus groups crafting the message to be deceptive”, then you lose.

It should be your duty to be intentionally honest and only accidentally confusing in proportion to your time and experience in crafting messages. A carefully curated message should be required to be entirely honest, a quick retort can be less rigorous (but still not intentionally deceptive; much harder to prove, but also less likely to be perfectly deceptive).

chiefalchemist6• 2 years ago

This would be a start

https://www.openculture.com/2020/01/jim-lehrers-16-rules-for...

tacticalturtle• 2 years ago

The fairness doctrine only applied to broadcast license holders, so it would have never affected internet or cable news companies.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

I'm quite familiar with the background literature, and include a "short reading list" on media for that reason:

<https://web.archive.org/web/20230610061138/https://old.reddi...>

I'd especially point out Hamilton Holt's excellent, fact-filled, and highly readable Commercialism and Journalism (1909), 124 large-print pages. Yes, it's dated, but precisely for that reason it both pressages virtually all present discussion and gives an excellent and valuable view of how things stood and had evolved just as the phenomenon of advertising-supported media was emerging.

<https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holt/page/n7/m...>

There are far more academic, recent, detailed, and lengthy works. But if you want the maximum bang for your reading buck, start with this one.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Addressing your other points:

Especially in the 19th century, many newspapers were explicitly partisan, often organs of various political parties, e.g., the Arizona Republican (GOP) or American Federationist (labour / AFL/CIO).

Emergence of a (nominally) unbiased, nonpartisan press largely followed publication of Public Opinion by Walter Lippmann (1922), and probably came to a fore during WWII, which in many ways was the high-water mark of American journalism as a near-universally-purchased service.

I.F. Stone's 1974? interview on public broadcasting's Day at Night is an excellent insight into the state of US media at that time. It had reached another high-water mark with the Watergate scandal, in which two reporters ultimately brought down the President of the United States. Still, Stone saw many faults in the US media landscape, most of which have grown since then:

<https://yewtu.be/watch?v=qV3gO3zxQ1g>

Edward Jay Epstein's News from Nowhere: Television and the News (1973) also affords strong insights to video news and how it is constituted. Again, technology has progressed but many of the fundamental issues, particularly around audience development and narrative-fitting, remain:

<https://archive.org/details/newsfromnowheret0000epst>

jimjimjim• 2 years ago

I really do believe there should be negative repercussions for bullshitting. I would pay for a news source that fact checked anything said by a politician and stated it in the news article. And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery to their face.

shiroiushi5• 2 years ago

And also, during interviews, called out obvious bullshittery to their face.

The problem here is that politicians simply won't do interviews with these journalists. I think we saw exactly this during the Trump administration. This idea would probably only work if all the journalists adopted this policy (prisoner's dilemma).

listenallyall4• 2 years ago

If "news" was highly regulated then likely nobody would produce it. Everything would simply become "opinion" or discussion of topics. Honestly you already see that at all the host-personality shows on CNN/Fox/MSNBC, every hour starts with a monologue then 50 minutes of panel discussions.

autoexec3• 2 years ago

If "news" was highly regulated then likely nobody would produce it. Everything would simply become "opinion" or discussion of topics.

That doesn't really seem much different from what we have now though. It seems like there's more commentary than content.

cebert2• 2 years ago

Treating the news like fresh water and clean air and exposing it to an ultraviolet level of regulation and rigor is the cure.

Politicians and parties with a majority can change. How can we trust that those regulating the news and determining what is truth or misinformation?

NullPrefix2• 2 years ago

Why are you mentioning NPR? NPR isn't a news source, NPR is just another political tool.

Truth is less important
Truth gets on the way of consensus and getting big things done.

NPR CEO https://x.com/realCarola2Hope/status/1823746926279582115

jonquark• 2 years ago

This seems to be a mischaractisation of what she was saying: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2024/05/08/n...

timbit42• 2 years 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.

apercu4• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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-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.

apercu4• 2 years 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.

jaredwiener2• 2 years 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.

throwadobe• 2 years ago

It's an interesting problem, but I would say that a single feed of the "latest" news isn't really what I want as a reader. I already have twitter for that. None of your writers are known to me so I'm not going to implicitly trust them more than John Doe on Twitter.

I'd rather have a frontpage that looks more like wsj.com or nytimes.com or bloomberg.com but changes over time depending on what's trending. Plus you can have different sections for different topics, an opinion section, etc. You can automate all of that with algorithms/heuristics. Make an LLM do it for you so you can slap "AI" on your startup's story and get funding. Then writers can submit topics and users can get personalized content based on the kind of stuff they like engaging with... but also have a chance to check out the "general" frontpage if they want what everyone else is reading

Now I'm ready for your Launch HN!

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

You're actually addressing a few points I'd not covered in my piece, key being how people access news.

I actually do go to the homepages of several news organisations, and read their front pages. I rely far less on social media than I had in, say the mid-2010s (largely Google+ at the time), though I of course use HN as an aggregator, as well as the Fediverse, very occasionally Diaspora* (long story, largely irrelevant here), and a few other sites. I'll also listen to podcasts (largely not news-related, though some are included). I've never been a TV watcher, and have cut back markedly on radio as well.[1]

That said, my practice is probably not typical.

I also find the layout of homepages ... problematic. There are sections I'm interested in, others not so much. It's often possible to eliminate low-interest sections through CSS, though that's not especially user-friendly. Adding in sections that are missing but for which coverage exists is more of a challenge, of course. Of the "text-only"/lite sites I visit (CNN, NPR), the lack of any sensible grouping of stories is annoying, combined with lack of context and often-clickbait headlines. I'm hard-pressed to come up with positive examples, though the sensible grouping and microcontent provided at ProPublica and the WSJ (speaking to layout rather than content/editorial slant) are better than most.

It would be really interesting to find a publication which dropped, say, a PDF or ePub on a regular basis (daily or weekly) which I could read through. I have an e-ink ebook reader, which is the best digital reading environment I've found, but managing content on it is an absolute nightmare, and there's nothing about it which would make a regular subscription easier. Unlike physical publications, you can't "pick it up and throw it away". I do append items of interest to an ePub document and read through that, which has ... some benefits.

I agree with your assessment of the clickbait dynamics. That's part of the problem with present media/journalism models, and is discussed by many people. (I think Ezra Klein's addressed this point well several times on his podcast at the NY Times, possibly also earlier at Vox.)

I'm interested in what your own journalistic beat is going to be: national/world news? Local news? (That's the biggest hole / desert presently.) Are your journalists within your own organisation or are you aggregating from others? And of course: how are you (and they) getting paid?

What's success look like? Failure?

________________________________

Notes:

1. Less for reasons of bias than that I'm finding programming annoying to listen to. The switch to live (rather than pre-recorded segment) broadcast, increased sponsor-slot breaks, and other characteristics make even public broadcasting annoying to me. I find non-live programming such as GBH's The World much more amenable and reminiscent of old-school NPR, of the 1990s or early aughts.

jaredwiener2• 2 years ago

My co-founder and I are both former journalists; we met years ago at ABC News. Getting this right is personal to us -- there's a definite gap in between how important we think news is with how much it seems to be worth in the market -- a big problem considering how expensive it is to do correctly.

Our aspirational goal is to be THE place for news updates, regardless of what you're into. Before we started, I asked my decidedly non-news-junkie now-wife what she does to stay up to date -- she told me CNN.com. I pushed her for why them -- was it coverage decisions? A perceived ideological bent? She said "no, it loads quickly and I can scroll quickly through the headlines." We want to that, better.

It's interesting that you bring up local vs. national. One of the things we learned pretty early on is that while people say they want local news, it's often a non-starter if it isn't presented in conjunction with national headlines. So we do both. Our corny internal motto is "around the block and around the world" -- lets cover the water main break down the street AND Gaza/Ukraine/etc -- and everything in between. It's a tall order.

We have local in many places, though its uneven across the country. You can try NYC (https://www.forth.news/nyc) to get an idea of an area with local coverage. (For obvious reasons, we don't push local reporting on users outside of the area.)

We don't usually do the reporting ourselves. Looking to places like Twitter for inspiration, we recruit journalists and newsrooms to share their reporting. We cannot possibly know their beats like they do -- and they're already out there covering it. We verify they are who they say they are, and ask them too abide by an editorial policy (https://www.forth.news/docs/editorial). We want to be as easy to scroll -- and as relevant --as social, but without the misinfo, spam, hate speech, etc.

Right now no one is getting paid. I joke (and cry) that our biggest financial backer is my AmEx. Ideally we will build up enough breadth that we can sell our own sponsorships, or actually crack the subscription business model once and for all. Then we would share with the journalists/newsrooms, a la Spotify. (Btw, if you are a newsroom leader or journalist reading this, we'd love to chat - https://journalists.forth.news)

Any thoughts/questions/etc - I'm jared (at) forth (dot) news.

madrox3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

madrox3• 2 years ago

Quite right

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

motohagiography2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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!

motohagiography2• 2 years 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.

taeric3• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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>). 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_journa...>).

But I'd suggest that the population for whom quality, relevant news is of high interest is relatively small.

taeric3• 2 years ago

That last line is one I was aiming at, but I do not have any way to quantify it.

I used to want to try and make the news valuable to myself. I have yet to find a way to do that, though. Such that I am unlikely to want to pay for it anytime soon. Would be neat to consider ways I could start making the news of more personal value.

eduction• 2 years ago

You’re wrong to suggest the Journal is no longer owned by Dow Jones. Maybe you’re referring to the fact that until about 16 years ago Dow Jones was owned by the Bancroft family, then it was acquired by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch).

I think the quality has remained quite high, and the rather robust subscription numbers bear that out (millions of people paying $40/month is impressive). It helps that the WSJ news staff resisted the temptation to abandon objectivity as at NYT.

The FT and Economist are nice but FT newsroom is an order of magnitude smaller than WSJ and the Economist an order of magnitude smaller than that (if you’re subscriber who checks daily you’ll know this).

Of the three I’d keep WSJ if I had to choose. FT is very nice for an international perspective though. Economist for high level summary.

asdff5• 2 years ago

If you are making informed decisions about something you should not be looking at the news for information. You should be looking at data.

notdang• 2 years ago

Good luck looking for data and ignoring news when you country and worse, the region where you live is being invaded by the neighbor and you need to make an informed decision to stay or to leave.

t-writescode3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Apple News somewhat approaches the concept of an ISP-based gateway, yes.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

This gets to the tollbooth problem.

With print subscriptions, the publisher was one clear tollbooth, as unless subscribers paid for delivery, the paper wasn't delivered. That was a leaky model --- there were copies circulated at offices, people would bring and leave papers at cafes, they could be read at libraries or private clubs. But generally, a copy of the paper or magazine had to be bought.

The other tollbooth was the newsstand, where individual copies could be bought from either a manned or unmanned site.

With the Internet and Web, the notion of such tollbooths is largely eliminated. As I've suggested several times in this discussion, the two highly obvious tollbooths are either the ISP (with whom the reader has an existing relationship, though less so in the case of, say, public WiFi), or a taxing authority who could assess a payment on all residents of a region (on the basis that media and an informed public contribute to the common weal). Or perhaps other indirect assessments, as with old legal notice requirements (see: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>).

d_k_h4• 2 years ago

Of course there is the small detail of removing agency from the internet user at that point. Maybe I don't want to support local/regional news or maybe that extra fee is going to make the access untenable for me.

Beyond that it would devolve into a scenario where entities would begin trying to game whatever system is created to get a cut of the pie.

Forced support is not the answer.

wrp• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

hakanito3• 2 years 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• 2 years 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).

mayneack• 2 years ago

You're basically describing the BAT from Brave

Terr_• 2 years ago

Cue wave of "micropayments" deja-vu from the 1990s.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Re: micropayments: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41261063>

mdp20212• 2 years ago

Until we have anonymous electronic money, this still does not overcome the problem of privacy (it may worsen it).

"Problem of privacy" which incidentally made me very relieved to find in your article: it is nice not to be alone

I don’t want or need entities with strong (e.g., credit-card-payment grade) proof of my identity tracking to the paragraph what I’m reading

rufus_foreman2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

Barrin92• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Why do you think that is, and how might you suggest improving the situation?

dotnet00• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

noirbot4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I'm more likely to pay money to never see "news".

meiraleal• 2 years ago

The payment for news is the influence they get on society. There will always be billionaires and millionaires willing to subside it.

65• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

vundercind2• 2 years ago

Paper UI beats digital in a lot of ways. I haven’t replaced my several-hundred book library with ebooks not because I love all these heavy, bulky objects, but because the UI of an ebook is a lot worse for anything but entirely linear cotton-candy fiction reading. It’s got (enormous) advantages on weight, searchability (… though, a good index is better IMO) and not needing separate large-print editions for some readers, but basically everything else about the UI is worse.

I’d be thrilled if ebook devices could somehow close that gap.

hatethissite42• 2 years ago

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.

Me. I am exactly opposite on this. I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article. I don't think this is uncommon, either.

bell-cot• 2 years ago

Sometimes me. But 99% of the time, my preference is for a competent journalist distilling the interview into an article. Thus sparing me all the ways that politeness, chit-chat, and long-winded stuff can turn a 1,000-word article into a 4,000-word interview.

WalterBright• 2 years ago

I don't want to watch a video if it could have been an article.

Same for me. I can read a transcript of a talk in 5 minutes, while it would take an hour to listen to the video.

cryptonector2• 2 years ago

If I can watch/listen at 2.5x speed, I might prefer that over reading. It's a question of bandwidth and comfort.

trilobyte• 2 years ago

I used to be this way, but I've started to err on the side of video because there's a lot that's unspoken/unfiltered through the journalists biases if you watch someone in an interview. Body language, what they leave unspoken, answers to questions that seem conflicting or irreconcilable with previous answers.

randomdata• 2 years ago

If it is important, I want to read it. If it is merely a curiosity, I want to listen to it while doing something else. The newspapers deliver mostly curiosities.

driscoll42• 2 years ago

100% I hate the videofication of the internet. So much content is locked behind a video that is vastly more difficult to pull detail out of and search and just text. Videos are a great supplement to most text, but rarely do they make a good primary source of information.

nitwit005• 2 years ago

who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview

News websites have pushed video in various forms, as it generally has higher ad revenue, but people often skip right over it for the text.

A perk of text is you can glance through it extremely quickly, to see if there is anything interesting.

marcus_holmes6• 2 years ago

Part of this was Zuckerberg outright lying to everyone about video's impact. I was involved in a newspaper doing this and we did a big push to video because FB told us it got more impact. Actually digging into the numbers showed this wasn't true, or if it was then people weren't clicking through the video to somewhere we could serve ads to them. It ended up losing us money and diverting time and effort when it was sorely needed elsewhere.

marcus_holmes6• 2 years ago

Have worked in newpsapers. Can confirm the "Journalism is sacred" attitude, accompanied by a "we don't need to think of the economics or the reader - we write what we (i.e. other journalists) think is good copy, and someone needs to pay us for doing that" attitude.

The stupid thing is, though, that they're right. Our democracies need investigative journalism to survive, or we get what we're seeing now - corrupt politicians looting the public coffers. What has happened in the UK over the last ten years would not have happened back in the 90's, not because politicians were better people back then, but because the journalists would have had a field day reporting on their shenanigans.

You can't have this paid for by taxes. The BBC in the UK, and the ABC in Australia, have both been suspiciously quiet about government shenanigans and have generally not rocked the boat, which desperately needed rocking at times. There's just too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking the charter if the boat gets rocked too much.

We're seeing news organisations funded by billionaires, but they do interfere editorially, and we know that, and more importantly the politicians know that. Billionaires can be leant on to stop investigative journalists from doing their thing.

It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but we need to sort it out soon.

Leherenn• 2 years ago

"You can't have this paid for by taxes. [...] There's just too much weight behind the never-spoken-out-loud threat of revoking the charter"

Sounds like an implementation issue more than a fundamental truth. In Switzerland, the public broadcasters are funded by a special tax as well, but any change to it would have to be approved by the population.

At the same time, I'm not sure the SRF/RTS is actually better at reporting shenanigans.

ogogmad• 2 years ago

Where do blogs, twitter, chat rooms, etc fit into all of this? They are yet more options we have now.

jzb2• 2 years ago

"It needs to be funded by the readers. But the readers are reluctant to pay for this (as TFA says). It's a conundrum, but we need to sort it out soon."

Readers often say they want one type of coverage but actually consume others, too. (e.g., people complain mightily about "clickbait" headlines and so forth -- but write an in-depth article with everything people say they want and often it gets a fraction of the traffic.)

But, yes, the best path to producing news that a community needs in the form of investigative journalism and not being driven by entertainment factors is if the news is paid for by readers.

Of course the other problem here is "L" in the article: Subscription fatigue. I do value quality news, I do subscribe to several publications local, national, and global in scope. But every now and again I look over my credit card statement and think "holy shit, that's a lot of little charges".

As a side note, I love this article and I wish I knew the author to go out for beers and discuss/argue about media.

mabster• 2 years ago

The BBC used to call out the government, but yeah that has clearly changed.

Australian ABC still does call out the government. In fact they were raided for reporting on the Afghan files. The politicians have threatened revoking the charter multiple times.

The ABC generally leans socially liberal which means it's usually the conservatives complaining though.

tracker1• 2 years ago

For that matter, online community sites generally do okay for staying informed of local news and events.

On the national level, it's partly a matter of commoditization. Most national or global News is so well reported, usually, you're going to find many sources.

Media bias and govt collusion, perceived or real, is another reason why some are looking beyond traditional media sources alone.

That doesn't even get into new media and domain specific news sources.

But above it all. The same reason people don't pay for every streaming service. They can't afford to and shouldn't be expected to. People don't tend to get their news from a single source anymore. Nobody is going to pay for a half dozen news sites or more.

ghaff• 2 years ago

My town used to have a quality local paper but now Facebook is pretty much the only source for news.

wiseowise• 2 years ago

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.

I want. I grew to despise video format, unless it is a movie or a TV series.

tivert2• 2 years ago

Even feature stories just don't have much pizzaz - who really wants to read an interview - I want to watch an interview.

I think you need to check your personal biases there. I want to read an interview, rather than watch it. Reading is typically faster, allows for skimming, can can be done anywhere with little fuss (e.g. no headphones).

That's why I tend to hate video content that could be presented textually. Video should only be be for things that are necessarily visual.

I'd really only want to listen to an interview if it's someone I'm so interested in that I want to take it slow and make time for it.

And that's not just for news. I work in a company where "documentation" is typically a pile of years-old, 1-2 hour long meeting recordings, if you're lucky. All that content would be soooo much better as text.

Why would I pay to read about a carjacking in a far off neighborhood?

Because I might go to that neighborhood sometime? The whole point of a regional newspaper is to give a view of a local area not a hyperlocal area.

lupire• 2 years ago

Do you have map of all carjacking locations? Do you maintain it by teaching each individual news story?

troyvit4• 2 years ago

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?

It's messed up, but very little national news actually affects you. It's the carjackings, the city council meetings, all the boring boring stuff that actually decides things like your mortgage taxes, driving habits, crime rates in your neighborhood, etc. And it's the state level stuff that decides whether you can conceal and carry, the discounts you can get on electric cars and solar panels, the quality of the schools that are teaching the kids that will (hopefully) fund your retirement and such.

But nobody (including me[1]) cares about it, so nobody wants to pay for it, so reporters aren't getting paid to cover it. That's because we've successfully gamified (inter)national news to make it feel important, and it leads the way in the culture wars that we all think actually matter.

[1] I spend about $50/month on local and state news sources and I read those subscriptions on average about once a month.

bwanab• 2 years ago

I can't even imagine the number of times I've been reading an article about some event that takes place in a very specific area for which understanding that area is crucial to understanding the story and yet - no map! Nada. Nothing but words and maybe a few pictures of people doing something that while being nice shots convey no information other than that people were involved. It's maddening.

isk517• 2 years ago

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?

I think this sentence says a lot about why regional news paper are going under. In the case that someone was interested in a local carjacking why read about it in the paper when you could probably find out directly from the source on some local social network group (Facebook/Nextdoor/etc)? In the event that this is a trend why bother waiting for the newspaper to report on it when the internet makes it easy to read direct statements or directly question your local government about it? The local busy bodies using social media do a better job than the local news paper for about 99% of the non-events that are usually reported on.

httpz• 2 years 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_• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

willdr• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

pjc50• 2 years ago

UK political coverage is really bad precisely because of "bothsidesism". I feel the TV license has outlived its era.

graemep3• 2 years ago

Britain, not England!

I do not think it is all that good. I think the biggest problem is the nature of news media. It tends to shallow coverage, and video more than audio, and audio more than print.

I agree with the GP that people in a democracy should strive to have a informed opinion, but I think the best way to achieve that is to read books on the issues, not follow the news.

People cannot evaluate the accuracy of what they read either - that is why "Gell-Mann amnesia" is a problem. Again, it is a less prevalent problem with books and more detailed analysis (but it still exists, of course) than with news media.

The sheer complexity of a modern society makes it very hard to be well informed. Most people in the UK do not even understand the taxes they pay. I can guarantee that almost all otherwise well informed and educated people in the UK cannot explain national insurance correctly (the second biggest source of revenue, generating about two third of what income tax does), or how VAT works and what it is imposed on (just behind NI).

Understanding of economics is even worse. Anything niche like competition in software and online services (the sort of thing we often discuss on HN) is non existent. Even issues like education and healthcare that are not niche but are complex are not well understood.

At the end of the day most people vote tribally (i.e. the party they identify with) or emotionally.

beefnugs• 2 years ago

"it is not actionable"

Yeah this part really sucks, top of the line premium journalism leads to something like the Panama papers... no consequences whatsoever. So we get to know the world is shit, but nothing will be done about it whatsoever.

If there was some renaissance where actual journalism resulted in a series of deeper investigations on perceived jerks' deeper crimes, then maybe it would make a comeback

rayiner• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

presentation2• 2 years ago

Personally I find that the weather is pretty actionable.

asdff5• 2 years 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.

zht2• 2 years ago

what about your daughter's ability to get an abortion or health care coverage if she is unemployed?

harimau7773• 2 years ago

Being informed doesn't help without the power to change things.

esperent• 2 years ago

teenage daughter has shared her classmates feel apathetic towards current events

So, a teenager feels apathetic... and you're claiming this is a new development?

politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work

Hard disagree. It won't immediately change anything. But on the scale of months, years, decades? It has the potential to change nearly everything. If not for you, then surely for the marginalized.

If you're from the UK - Brexit was not an inevitability. Different parties in power, even a different PM at a certain point, and it wouldn't have happened. And it's demonstrably wrong to claim that isn't changing the lives of everyone in the UK by a huge amount.

If you're from the US - are you really so dumbly apathetic that you're going to claim that the choice of the next president won't affect your life?

There are a few countries that are stable enough (currently) that an argument could be made any political actions like voting won't change much. But these countries are few and far between,and even those are not guaranteed to stay stable.

hiAndrewQuinn• 2 years ago

These kinds of comments are always good times to repost Michael Huemer's "In Praise of Passivity", which tackles these arguments against not following the news in a generalized but imo very effective way.

https://bazhum.muzhp.pl/media/files/Studia_Humana/Studia_Hum...

card_zero2• 2 years ago

Perhaps you do in fact care about some selection of specific news, such as tech news, sports news, news of cultural tends, business news, and arts and entertainment news, for instance. Just not "news" news. And perhaps you get your news in specialist or indirect ways. I imagine you have an idea of what's going on generally, somehow, and keep up to date with more than the length of the grass outside.

carlosjobim5• 2 years ago

The truth that is unfolding is that people today have much less agency and influence than people had in the past, resulting in that news don't matter anymore. You are in your mid thirties and should be at the peak of your influence and agency in the world, and dependent on accurate information (news) to make the best decisions. But everything in the industrialized world is owned and controlled by geriatrics, including all and every aspect of government.

tail_exchange• 2 years ago

politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work

Maybe that is true for you, but this is not true for minorities and people who are fighting for a cause (abortion and trans rights, for example). Not being willing to cast a vote because it doesn't change anything for you doesn't seem like a virtue.

tgsovlerkhgsel• 2 years 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...)

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

The difficult in finding any pricing data (I spent several minutes trying to find out what the print price for the Sunday NYT is for an earlier response, let alone subscription rates) is ... dispiriting.

That's before getting to the ease or lack thereof of subscribing / cancelling.

There are well over 100 news sources which are routinely submitted to HN. Subscribing to each of those individually would cost a small fortune.

testrun• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_h4• 2 years ago

<$1 isn't a micro-transaction imo. It needs to be a fraction of cent.

ggm• 2 years 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.

vsuperpower20213• 2 years ago

Why won't some people pay for blockbuster movies?

rickydroll• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Why won't some people pay for propaganda?

edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes... is why I don't btw

Peteragain• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Just because most news isn't news. If something major happens in the world you will know without following news.

mdp20212• 2 years ago

Important news often go unnoticed, drowned in the main stream of news.

INTPenis• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

It's to hard and to expensive.

Refusing23• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

_fat_santa2• 2 years 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_santa2• 2 years ago

LorenPechtel• 2 years ago

This. We need multiple sources because everything will have a certain amount of bias baked in even if they're trying to be scrupulously honest. There will always be a zone of uncertainty and within that news organizations will generally choose a point on the side of whatever they think their readership wants to see.

And beyond that there's the reality that even the reasonably honest ones care more about being able to report than about the accuracy of the report. The threat of denied access gets most everyone to lie.

physicsguy2• 2 years 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.

Johanx643• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I haven't seen it framed this way, but yeah - well put.

pnut• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

openrisk2• 2 years 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.

_Algernon_3• 2 years ago

And one of the problems is that it is all intermingled together. For every useful / actionable piece of news there are a 100+ pieces of celebrity gossip, tweet-listicles, marketing PR releases, and irrelevant news pieces.

The news is as if a restaurant served you your meal out of a filled trash can, and then acted surprised that you don't pay. It's not really shocking, is it?

Johanx643• 2 years ago

Seems like another attempt to rationalize infotainment addiction frankly.

your remedy is akin to choping off your head because you have a headache.

Does anyone even remember a single instance where you have gone like "oh, shit, If only had I red the news" and then seriously regretting their choice of not reading the news?

Yeah, that doesn't happen, now does it?

There's virtually zero consequences for not reading any news. If anything, there's only positives. Whenever anything of substance and significance happens, you will get to know about it without reading any news.

You're acting like there would be no information flow and information exchange without the "news". While the most actionable and relevant information comes exactly from those - other types of information exchange.

Now on the small offchance, if some news source does actually contain some valuable and directly actionable (to you) information with high signal to noise ratio, then surely go ahead and read it, why wouldn't you, it's actionable.

carlosjobim5• 2 years ago

Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of benefitial way to you?

Of course they are, if you live in a place with good local news coverage and you have some kind of stake in your local society. For example, news about infrastructure plans have a huge effect on how companies conduct their business, which will have an impact on the daily lives of people working there. This will never get national coverage, because it's not of national interest.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

Local news is highly actionable. I learn what's going on in my community.

yunwal2• 2 years ago

This really depends on your local news source though. Mine is just listings of various petty crimes that happened this week.

rpdillon• 2 years ago

This stance is quite reminiscent of Aaron Swartz' take.

http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews

I think there's a lot of truth to it, though I wouldn't want to live in a society where I couldn't get news when I sought it out.

sebstefan3• 2 years ago

I spoke to a guy who had the same opinion recently

Absolutely refused to watch any kind of news or to follow politics whatsoever

In the same beat he told me in complete seriousness that a small town near him in Michigan had apparently been turned into Ghana-city after getting a million migrants from Ghana.

An information that he had heard from an older colleague on the shop floor of his factory

That would be the entire yearly immigration flow of the united stated being exclusively from Ghana and going exclusively to a small town in Michigan

It's a claim so outrageously easy to dismiss if you're even remotely informed that it makes you wonder what else that guy might believe

Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your brain to lay the foundation for it? The guy has the right to vote, by the way

So, yeah, obviously I'd disagree. You can't make smart choices without good data and getting the news contributes to this whether you realize it or not. Plus, democracy is more than voting freely, it relies on having educated and informed citizens to function.

blargey• 2 years ago

There's a logical leap between "read the news" and "become more credulous, or well-informed about underlying statistics like broad immigration rates".

yunwal2• 2 years ago

Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your brain to lay the foundation for it

Should the news be this foundation though? I think you'd be better off reading a few non-fiction books or magazines every year, perhaps informed on your choices by top headlines. Reading the news for detailed analysis on highly partisan topics is likely to make you less informed, not more.

BoingBoomTschak• 2 years ago

Better no data than data of questionable accuracy/honesty. Sure, this may lead to extreme cases like this (though he may still be right about the whole anecdote and wrong about the ridiculous number), but such credulous people would be in a worse position anyway if following the "news".

In the end, there's nothing worst than believing yourself to be "informed" of "data/facts" through medias. Ages old Socrates' "I know what I don't know".

Johanx643• 2 years ago

I ran into an gullible simpleton the other day, who happens to not watch any news. (subtext implication follows) If only had he "watched the news", surely he would have been cured of his condition and clued in to the truth.

What would actually happen in practice is that he would be parroting back 'facts' by a news source that would not be to your liking at all.

Because the "problem" ultimately is not him reading or not reading the news... it's somewhere else entirely, isn't it?

Just how exactly are you supposed to have a working critical thinking mind when you don't have any data in your brain to lay the foundation for it?

Your foundation for reliable data, critical thinking and making "smart choices" is watching the news?

No further comment necessary.

almatabata2• 2 years ago

Are any of the "news" items actionable in any sort of benefitial way to you?

I have read multiple articles detailing corrupt activities from politicians. Knowing this I made the explicit decision not to vote for them when I had the opportunity to do so. I would consider at least part of it actionable.

godshatter• 2 years ago

I'm similar, I don't follow the news right as it comes out very closely because it's too much and too obviously working on emotions. I do later read semi-historical information after enough time has passed that a more rational perspective can be discussed, though. I do this to avoid being corralled into one way of thinking through manipulation of the narrative (in purpose or by bias) in the moment, but later I want to see how the chips fell after time has allowed for a more balanced perspective with nuances.

aszantu• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

instagraham2• 2 years 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.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

The site is a Diaspora* pod:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_(social_network)>

It's got its plusses and minuses. Presentation, however, is pretty good.

ccozan• 2 years ago

In many european countries we pay already for news ( the TV tax ). In Germany is pretty hefty ( ~150 euro per year afaik ).

hcfman2• 2 years 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 ?

hcfman2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_3• 2 years ago

News is propaganda[1]. Why would I pay to be force-fed propaganda?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

cchi_co• 2 years 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_3• 2 years 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.

openrisk2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

Terretta3• 2 years ago

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.

For an earlier equilibrium, see "pamphleteering":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer

Publishing static content is extraordinarily cheap. Even with a dynamic site, such as a wiki, you can serve millions of occasional readers for $20/month.

As a 'newspaper' class resource, Wikipedia's all-in hosting for fully read/write content (meaning, visitors can edit, it's not static), is about $0.03 CPM, handling ~6.74B visits a month (80B visits a year) for $2.4M a year or $200,000/month.

So that's 8 million visits a month for $20, as a R/W membership wiki instead of a RO static site.

To be clear, this is not salaries. "Production costs" depend on whether someone has something to say and feels compelled to say it. The less meaningful the message to the messenger, they more they only say it for the money, and the more money it takes.

Adding salaries to wikipedia's number drops from 8 million visits per $20 per month, to 400,000 visits per $20 per month.

State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.

It's certainly enough, even de minimus.

Even with salaries baked in, costs remain low enough for patronage, public funding, or subscription models instead of advertising models.

At most any scale, the cost of saying something to the public is a rounding error.

pdonis5• 2 years ago

State funding has risks but may be the most effective option.

State funding doesn't solve the problem of getting good journalism. It just means journalism is biased in favor of the state, instead of biased in favor of whatever ideology the private owner has. If anything, bias in favor of the state is worse. Pravda and Isvestia in the Soviet Union were even less reliable than our mainstream media is now.

gspencley2• 2 years ago

While I would agree that there is a hole for certain news and information that isn't being filled (specifically investigative journalism and foreign affairs), I think there is a valid point to be made that, in the age of smart phones and social media, what use is there for the local newspaper and news network when if something happens close to you there is raw footage of it all over social media that shows exactly what happened without editorial. And that footage gets to you much quicker. Before the media companies can publish an article and find a way to spin it for sensationalism, complete with ads.

In this regard, I think there is a replacement. And for local news, I would argue that in many instances the replacement is far better since it is quicker to publish and has the potential to be far more objective.

EDIT: actually I think that hole is being filled, at least in part, by independent documentary filmmakers. What got disrupted were the mega conglomerates like Fox, CNN, MSNBC etc. And while spin and misinformation will always exist, because news is published by humans, I don't know why we would trust those conglomerates any more than any other random joe.

dredmorbius49• 2 years ago

Investigative journalism is something rather more than happening to be in the right place with a camera and mic.

Hard-hitting investigative journalism takes a long time, much research, analysis, interviews, FOIA requests, document leaks, etc., etc. It also all but inevitably requires some reasonably well-funded legal defence capacity as well. Publishers are known for their prodigious ink and paper budgets, but also legal retainers.

mort96• 2 years ago

I'm drowning in news everywhere I look, paying to see even more seems weird

margalabargala• 2 years ago

Is what you're drowning in news, though? Or is it something else, masquerading as news?

mikhael28• 2 years ago

Why would I pay for news when I have HN?

CM30• 2 years 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.

rnts08• 2 years 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.

carlosjobim5• 2 years 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.

2OEH8eoCRo02• 2 years ago

There's nothing that's more expensive than free.

elif• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

So you pay them in exposure?

simianparrot• 2 years 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_h4• 2 years ago

There is a general quality issue. Do they even use editors any more? the bad writing alone should be embarrassing.

hacsky• 2 years ago

Why would i pay for gossip?

AstroJetson• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Because I get all the news I want for free...

It's really as simple as that.

redmattred• 2 years ago

It's not valuable enough for them personally to want to pay for it.

bernardlunn• 2 years ago

Scanning headlines is free and enough for me

charles_f• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I will pay for news when people competent on the different matters will be writing them.

8f2ab37a-ed6c4• 2 years 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.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• 2 years 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?

ok1234563• 2 years 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.

nh23423fefe• 2 years ago

This reads like a poor attempt at moralizing. Why would i imagine news revenue is directed morally? Why is the relative size relevant?

barryrandall• 2 years ago

If people subscribed to a publication expecting it to be mostly news and got mostly sensationalism, do you expect them to keep paying?

chiffre01• 2 years ago

How exactly is news working against your interests?

agumonkey• 2 years ago

Influence, anxiety, noise. That's how I interpret his comment.

coldpie2• 2 years ago

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

I follow one or two very local news sources[1], who post about three to five stories a week. I find those valuable: new restaurants opening, construction going on, what's going on with local organizations & politicians, some local history. It's up to ten minutes a day. And, I choose to pay a subscription to support each of these.

Outside that, I 100% agree with you. National news? Complete waste of time. World news? Somehow an even bigger waste. Reading random vomit on Twitter? Good lord, taking up smoking is a better use of your life than that. No way in hell I'm wasting my life or money on any of that junk. It's despairing to see so many people I know spending hours every day reading national news junk to absolutely no purpose. You can know everything you need to know about the world in ten minutes a day. More than that is just throwing your time down the garbage.

[1] An example: https://racketmn.com

levkk• 2 years ago

No way in hell I'm wasting my life or money on any of that junk. It's despairing to see so many people I know spending hours every day reading national news junk to absolutely no purpose.

Now imagine you don't have access to those anymore. Overconsumption of news clearly is a problem, but shutting yourself off to the what's happening in the world is somehow worse.

marginalien• 2 years ago

I do get the point that following news constantly all day long is a bit like doom scrolling and doesn’t add much to a good life. However, I would not go as far as saying „complete waste of time“. It is Saturday morning and I just read a long interview with Wladimir Kara-Mursa, one of the Russian opposition politicians who was recently released from prison as part of a prisoner exchange. In the interview, Kara-Mursa talks a lot about his time in Russian jails, Putin‘s system, and being a opposition politician in Russia. Does it to relate my everyday normal life here in Germany? Well of course it does not at first glance. But at second and third glance it does and most importantly it helps me appreciate what I consider my normal everyday life in a democracy and it informs my decision making when it comes to the upcoming elections and the way different parties position themselves towards Russia and the war in Ukraine.

That being said, I don’t think it makes much sense to follow any type of news all the time all day long, but I would really miss it if it was no longer available as it helps me put things / my life into context and make more informed decisions at the ballot box. And sure I am willing to pay for that type of journalism.

blablabla123• 2 years ago

Yeah sometimes people advocate for it but might end up making problematic decisions when it comes to voting. Many people may vote after all but if it's not based on news it can be problematic. Solely relying on Wikipedia or History might not give full context and could overly rationalize the decision making. After all, people want their policy makers to make their inhabitants happy (irrational) and not just optimize a (simplified yet rational) metric.

I don't think though there is unbiased news. Generally a classic recommendation has been to read across multiple sources.

troyvit4• 2 years ago

One metric for investigative journalism, in my opinion, is to look at how many journalists are in jail:

https://www.statista.com/chart/16414/jailed-journalists-time...

This is only one data point and doesn't include journalists who were railroad out of their jobs, disappeared, murdered, etc.

stavros3• 2 years ago

there is still a question of how one would support quality investigative journalism and someone to hold the powers that be accountable

I don't think there is: You pay for it, since it's in your best interests to. I'd pay for that. Unfortunately, in my country, there aren't any outlets like that that I know of, everything is government propaganda.

rightbyte2• 2 years ago

You mind namedropping the country? It seems like the common setup is pro-elite but pro or anti government seems like a tossup.

jack_pp• 2 years ago

In Romania we have YouTube channels that do only investigative reporting and people fund them through YouTube membership, super tips and Patreon. Can look up recorder Romania if you are curious

strangattractor3• 2 years ago

Old enough to remember Cronkite or MacNeil Lehrer - there was a time with more facts less ideology. Ever since the news became a profit center it just isn't as useful. One literally has to follow double digit numbers of outlets to get a reasonable picture of reality. It is simply too costly. The News rooms have become their own undoing.

netbioserror2• 2 years ago

Old school news anchors were NOT neutral. The stories they chose and the language they used shaped perceptions just as much as now, only they had precious little competition back then. They so completely shaped the population's perception of that era that retroactive analyses using better evidence to reach new conclusions about the events of that time are reflexively rejected by most people, demonstrating incuriosity and close-mindedness out of loyalty to established narratives. That is ideology.

8f2ab37a-ed6c4• 2 years ago

More from Caplan here on this: https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/bryan-caplan-stop-re...

soulofmischief• 2 years ago

The quality of our lives is too entwined with foreign politics for us to maintain ethical ignorance of what happens in the world around us.

bithive123• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

rambojohnson• 2 years ago

why would I pay for a narrative?

wdotica• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I would pay for news, I won't pay for opinions.

mediumsmart• 2 years ago

Why do some people pay for news? I don’t know but we could ask them.

bhelkey• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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.

GnarfGnarf2• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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_WVGG2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

My brother used to be a reporter and editor.

IIRC, he said Craigslist killing classified ads did major violence to papers' finances.

Eric_WVGG2• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

I just listen to No Agenda, a veritable news source by composting most news sources.

d_k_h4• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years 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

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

IMHO You read the news to have something new to talk about with friends/family you meet often.

kazinator• 2 years 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• 2 years 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• 2 years ago

Hypothesis: many HN users would pay $1 to read a WSJ, FT, or Information article.

sevensor• 2 years 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• 2 years 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?)

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

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