Comment by api
2 days ago
The problem is that nobody would pay for it. People expect news to be free, and click bait and lazy copy paste or LLM journalism is cheaper and works just as well to get clicks for ad dollars.
Would people pay for real journalism?
Depending on the specifics of the publication, we can broadly say that print media used to get more revenue from advertising than people actually buying the physical media.
You could Google it and read about the decline but Wikipedia is a place to start:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_of_newspapers?wprov=sf...
Newspapers used to give copies of their daily paper away in bulk to distribution hubs so as to boost circulation. In fact, they still do.
You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight.
You're really just observing that the marginal cost of reading is tiny. That doesn't mean that the fixed cost of producing an article or edition isn't very large, and needs to be paid for somehow.
"You can often pick up a paper for free when boarding a flight."
I have literally never seen this. In the US?
In Europe for instance
The beginning of the end was Gannett and USA today...
Lets be real here, in the past advertisers did pay for it, but all advertising spend has moved on to the clickbait-youtube/google/Facebook garbage heap.
Don't people already pay for things like the NYT?
I guess local papers might be harder, they may have to demonstrate they can reveal the journalistic failures of other papers in local affairs.
Nobody pays for news from the NYT. NYT is a game developer that also provides news on the side. Their games are their main draw; my gf subscribes and never reads the news.
https://www.axios.com/2024/01/29/wordle-nyt-games-news-media...
The legacy media were advertising companies who also happened to provide news. People aren't willing to subscribe for advertising, but they will for games.
If we're going by anecdata, here's another data point: I subscribe to NYT and don't play any of their games. Yes, I read it for the articles but also, to a large degree, for the subscriber comments as well. Similarly to the reason I frequent Hacker News. And to stay up to date with what has been my home for a long time. And also NYT Cooking, though I only access that once in a blue moon.
It's fascinating to me that people would pay to read obvious political propaganda.
I get that the state-sponsored "news" in many EU countries is heavily politically coloured, but why would something like NYT be if they have paying subscribers? I never did the research, but I'm guessing they must have huge additional streams of income besides payments from readers?
It's depressing to see the paper that once had the courage to publish the Pentagon Papers seen as publishing political propaganda.
What alternative revenue incentive do you see that could support independent journalism?
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It's a form of tithing. You give to the propagandists providing the slant you align with, even if they're wealthy billionaires. It's been common for belief communities for centuries. Poor people do it for access to wealthy individuals or as a form of gambling on the promises of the propaganda, and wealthy individuals, when they give, are also doing so for influence (access to poor people en masse). Its propaganda all the way down.
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Traditionally it was ads that contributed most of the money a newspaper took in, but the fact that people were paying for the paper re-assured the people buying the ads that the papers were actually being read.
NYT is an exception, or more specifically it's much bigger than most other news shops and has the luxury of having a large loyal customer base, a brand reputation to defend, and a full time business analysis and data science team to upkeep its excellence. Your local papers are barely scraping by and are mostly owned by hedge funds whose primary objective to squeeze the consumer via judicial usage of paywalls and clickbaits. A commitment to truth and deep investigative reporting for them does not keep the lights on. The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests. The price for those is indoctrination.
Also NYT has spent a lot of time and energy into diversifying into things that are not news.
There is a subset of its customers that is only really paying for the games like the crossword. There is a subset only really paying for Cooking. etc.
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I’m reasonably sure that most of the national-level news media companies have been owned by millionaires (and now billionaires) for the last century. William Randolph Hearst, E.W. Scripps, the Ochs-Sulzberger family, Raoul H. Fleischmann, Cyrus H. K. Curtis are a few of the prominent wealthy owners of nationally-distributed news outlets and publications in 1925. Back farther to the Civil War you find more “independent” publications but it’s a challenge to determine which of them were privately owned by individuals of considerable wealth vs. those owned by their publishers who may or may not have been wealthy.
For a current breakdown, see: Index of News Media Ownership: https://futureofmedia.hsites.harvard.edu/index-us-mainstream...
> The problem is that nobody would pay for it
User "api" said "nobody", so that is enough to refute their point. Some people would might pay for it, it seems.
> NYT is an exception
> The other papers and magazines are all subsidized by billionaires or other vested interests.
How is the NYT an exception?
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Surprised that no one has mentioned 404 media, a dedicated news sub I pay for annually. Good reporting is worth it to me, especially to get past all the b.s. marketing hype and influencer shilling. Maybe they’re unpopular here on HN but I stand by the sentiment: legit, good journalism is worth supporting financially.
>Would people pay for real journalism?
See the comments every time a pay-walled article is posted here.
The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from. I'd like a convenient way to pay a few cents per article, I could maintain my own balance of "news budget" per month and spend it, but paying US$ 5-10 at each paywall I encounter is simply not viable.
All newspapers got fucked by the internet, I can't comprehend how they didn't figure out that banding together to provide a centralised service to allow me to keep a balance and pay out per article read might have worked. Instead they defaulted to using Big Tech ad networks to patch their lost revenue.
Make it convenient and people might pay, requiring a subscription is definitely a huge friction on the top of the funnel, I'd even say it's a very fine mesh grater. No one wants to go through a fine mesh grater to read news articles.
> The problem with current paywalls is that each one wants you to purchase a monthly subscription to read the article, I don't want to have a subscription for each news site I might want to read an article from.
Yet people love their monthly subscriptions to listen to a song or an album (Spotify), or to watch a movie (Netflix). It's clear to me that the future of written content, especially news, is mass syndication (like you mention). Where you pay a monthly subscription to get access to a wast library of content from different sources.
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I think about this from time to time. Personally I would pay per article if it's convenient. I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
The papers wouldn't go for it, but these days I can subscribe to individual writers I like on Substack rather than paying for a newspaper subscription and subsidizing content I don't care about. More bang for buck. People have to be met halfway.
> I don't want to shell out $20/mo for, say, the Economist right now but if there was a particular article I wanted to read I'd probably pay a few bucks.
The Economist is one of the few news sources worth paying for.
Every week, there's a tour of the world's major events, by region. There will also be an in-depth article on one country (how's Rwanda getting along?), an in-depth article on one industry (what's the situation with bauxite supply?) and maybe a section on some technology (water desalination, who's doing it?) Over a year, most of the world and most of the industries are covered. Read the Economist for a year and you get a sense of how the world works.
The target audience is the movers and shakers of the world. Look at the employment ads.
There's a general pro-capitalism bias, but it's British-European, not US-oriented.
I love their writing, but I hate their subscriptions. The only way to cancel is to talk to customer service via chat or phone, who will keep begging and insisting that you not cancel and offering discounts to try to stop you. When I finally did manage to cancel, it required at least half an hour of insisting to some salesman.
I originally planned to just take a break, but after that distasteful cancellation procedure, I didn’t feel like resubscribing.
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Yeah, it's good. I just find it expensive to pay for regularly.
The underlying assumption is that of capitalism, that is, that things should be profitable or at least self-sustaining. But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.
Independent news should be completely free from capitalist interests.
[0] https://facts.usps.com/8-mile-mule-train-delivery/
> But if you do that, things like the USPS donkey train [0] would be stripped, the US military would / should be reduced to a fraction of its current size or down to nothing, etc.
and that is a problem because? These are funded by tax dollars collected. It's impossible for people to stop paying for them whether they make sense or not.
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The article here is about bad faith left wing arguments. Presumably you'd pay for those I guess?