Comment by _DeadFred_
1 year ago
I used to buy magazines in the 90s that cost upwards of $6-8 a magazine each, that's $18 in today's dollars.
You want access to multiple large reporting agencies work but want to pay less than a fraction of the non-adjusted 1990s prices. Your better solution has zero way to work financially. Imagine saying 'why do I have to pay for a whole buffet, I only pick from 5-10 of the buffet dishes that I pick and choose as I walk down the line, I don't take something from all of them. I should pay like fifty cents.'
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.
Or that one article you wrote for motherboard about undersea cables in (2010) occasionnaly makes it to the top of hacker news…
Also, we did use to pay for the dead ends by just buying a paper with some ads in it. You haven’t explained why this model doesn’t work anymore? The newspapers have reintroduced the ‘you read it you pay for it’ with paywalls but they’ve overshot, now it’s like you go into the newsagent on the corner and they are shouting ‘you read it, you buy a years worth of that newspaper’ when you see one headline that interests you.
Which sites/newspapers are you talking about? Many have metered paywalls, where you get a few articles for free before the paywall hits.
Beyond that, others (Blendle, post.news, etc) have tried micropayments and they don't work -- people don't actually want them.
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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.
Much like with books, the 10-15 best sellers a publisher has fund the thousands of duds. Newspapers are as cheap as they are because the filler content gets subsidized by the good stuff. And it is rare that a publisher will know what is good before it is released.
Newspapers are as cheap as they are because they are still filled with ads. Not that i mind it, ads on paper are 1000x more tolerable than the blinking, spying popovers one get online.
I doubt it. If a reporter finds a good scoop, then it will move above the fold on front page or section header or become long form piece.
Ok, then. How about 2.5 dollars for the x articles of this day/week?
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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.
Aren't newspapers all in a terrible financial state?
Mostly requiring subsidy by billionaires wanting to popularise their weird political views?
Isn’t that exactly why having the option to buy a set number of articles would be better? If you get weirded out by your newspaper of choice you can try some other ones without subscribing for a year. Or even better regularly dip into newspapers from all sides of the political spectrum to get a balanced view on a topic.
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
All the ones I get are just PDF's... but the the trouble is I have already read all the content on the internet from other web sites a few months ago :(.