Comment by whartung

Exactly!

The economics of journalism are constantly misunderstood here. People want thoughtful, insightful, investigative stories of the non-obvious (or so they say) but also do not want to pay for the dead ends that a reporter has to find to get there.

Journalism is more like hard-tech research than SaaS. You don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you start reporting, and getting something of value can take an incredibly long time. The actual writing of an article or shooting of a video is the last part of a long process.

Unlike hard-tech, the result often has a very short shelf-life. It's not going to continuously earn payouts for the reporters/news outlet for more than a couple of weeks (at best) after publication.

Last year the NYT cost $2.50 at the newsstand. GP wants to pay ~$1.50 for 15 individual articles. There are more than 15 articles in a single edition of the NYT, so that sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Hell, bump it up to $2.50/yr for those 15 articles/yr, same price as a single physical edition. GP would probably still be ok with that, and that doesn't seem unreasonable.

I'm not sure what magazines you were buying in the 90s for $6-$8 each, but they were certainly on the high end and not representative of your average newspaper, which were on the order of 35-50¢ at the time. Full-color glossy mags cost a lot more to produce than a newspaper, so I'm sure that's part of it.

I’m talking about a general newspaper like if I go to the newsagent now and buy a broadsheet newspaper like the FT or The Guardian or The Telegraph it costs something between £1.50 and £2.50 ($2-3USD) which gives me access to about 100 articles of which I might read max 10-15 of a weekend. So I think charging the same price for the same number of articles read should work no? If that transaction used to work with physical paper why do you think it doesn’t work with digital? Obviously for more specialist articles you would charge more and it would be better for those publications because they would be able to reach a wider audience because I’m not going to subscribe to Farmers Weekly to read that one article about tractor hacking but I might buy a one time access.

I used to buy all those gaming and elctronics magazines as a kid. But as a group of a dozen, we paid each a part of it, and it was timeshared.

Now try that with e-zines that are full of DRM

I gather you are outside the US, so my solution likely doesn't apply. For those in the US, check your local library's digital offerings.

Libraries in some larger cities will let you have a guest/out-of-town library card for a fee, which is often far less than the cost of subscribing to the digital content the library offers.

I don't subscribe to the NYT, but I do have a WaPo subscription. I'm considering canceling it. Most of what I read I can get syndicated elsewhere, or the same information presented with similar quality, elsewhere, for free.

(Plus I'm tired of further lining Bezos' pockets, and I very much disagree with some of the current editorial staff.)

I get that real, actually-solid journalism is not cheap to make. But I'm not sure what the solution is when good-enough articles can be had for far cheaper, or free. The good stuff really is a joy to read, but I'm not convinced $120/yr (looks like it's twice that for the NYT?) is worth the price of admission.

Certainly a lot of people do buy and keep these subscriptions, and subscriber counts do seem to be growing (which is genuinely great), but I would wager that far, far, far fewer people today have a newspaper subscription than in the mid-90s. But maybe that's changing; maybe people hate all the sensational, clickbaity, in-your-face ad-supported garbage floating around for free.

I would only hope that as online publications grow their subscriber base, instead of getting greedy, they actually lower their prices, since their marginal per-subscriber cost is near-zero. Given that NYT home delivery prices in 1995 were ~$350/yr, (~$700 in today's dollars), it seems a little absurd that they're charging 35% of that (for digital) when their cost of distribution is a fraction of a percent what it used to be. Presumably the reason behind that is because their subscriber base is much smaller than it used to be?

In a country of ~300 million people and with billions of people speaking English or having English as a second language that doesn’t sound like that many? If I bought the paper edition of the NYT most days for $2 that would be ~$600/yr in which case the online subscription would be good value and they would probably keep those subscribers as they are already demonstrating that they are dedicated repeat customers. If they also added the option to add 15 article reads to your account every now and then for $2 they would create a digital equivalent for the kind of person who buys a paper now and then.

After being away from it for a couple of years, I checked out Apple News+ again, and it's added a lot of newspapers and magazines in the time I was away.

The newspapers are almost all American, with a smattering of Canadian, but there seems to be a ton of British and Australian magazines.

It might be worth checking out to see if what's on offer matches your interests.

Unfortunately, unlike Apple Music, it doesn't have a web client. https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

Because there's a difference between what people say they want and what they actually want.

Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.

FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...

There was also Blendle which I thought was a great idea, but it flopped: https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...