[sethhochberg]

See, I look at this the exact opposite way - if I have to decide whether each individual article is worth paying for, I'm probably not going to read any articles. Its much easier for me to pay $10 a month and know that I can, with zero friction, read whatever article I want from the publications I respect. We're talking about the Wall Street Journal here; odds that they're going to only occasionally publish something I'm interested in are pretty low - I'm either interested in subscribing or I'm not.

[lazaroclapp]

The problem is, assuming you read 20 or so online newspapers at least occasionally, this has you keeping $200 a month of subscriptions, of which in most cases you will read a 2 or 3 articles a year because they ended up HN news or some other news aggregator you actually use.

This is even true if you only subscribe to relatively reputable traditional news sources, btw. Here are 12 that individually are worth it and most informed individuals would be served by reading on occasion, but few people would want to have individual subscriptions to them: WSJ, NYT, WaPo, The Economist, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy, Chicago Tribune, SF Chronicle, The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Die Welt. Nevermind the fact that I do have subscriptions to 2 of those, and they compound the problem by serving annoying video ads even to subscribers.

Edit: A model that I would consider fair though (and the journals might not, I don't know their cost structure) is: 2-5 free articles a month without subscription of any sort and with unobtrusive ads, paid subscription if you read more articles a month from that particular journal. Another option is a "library" subscription model, in which you pay $20 or $30 a month, but get access to a broad catalog of newspapers (about what you would find at a large public library in print) and they get profits based on what you actually read. And yes, I have seen this as a startup idea, Netflix for news, but newspapers never seem to go for it wholeheartedly enough for it to be worthwhile to consumers, though.

[dustinmr]

Seems to me, as readers, we're less in need of 'Netflix for news' and more in need of either consolidation or decentralization in journalism.

I have much less brand loyalty now than say 10 years ago. I have less respect for both the WSJ and NYT than I did. I don't think their incentives line up with mine anymore, and it leaves me without a news source I trust the way I once trusted both of them.

A larger entity that doesn't need to worry as much about getting me to hit the clickbait would serve me better as a reader (and I'd then be more likely to subscribe). Or, if I could subscribe to individual reporters or small groups of them in some way (such as Dave Pell's style of content delivery, but more availability and let me pay them some how), it would also better serve me as a reader.

Instead we're stuck with a structure where they don't make enough money, and thus continue devaluing their brands, and we as readers don't have an easy way to know who we can trust to respect us as customers (no surprise video ads, unbiased reporting, etc). So I guess I'll stick with using sites like HN to aggregate the news for me, and stop clicking on the WSJ links. The brand no longer signals unbiased quality journalism to me.

[lazaroclapp]

That all might be true, but I am still not sure the solution is simply being subscribed to a single very credible newspaper. That still means a single editorial line and no ability to share (links to) articles between people. It seems like an artifact of an old medium of distribution. When you had to get a bunch of pages at your doorstep, it made sense to have a single "provider" that bundled the news and analysis for you and decided what you got.

Now a days what we have is: individual journalists/teams that investigate and produce analysis, aggregators like HN or Reddit who point our which content is interesting/relevant and traditional media outlets which mostly serve to vouchsafe to some degree that the content is factual and credible. We can't get rid of the last component because we end up with no way of distinguishing real news from propaganda, disinformation and innuendo, and also because we haven't found a way to directly pay the first group except through the media orgs. A fully centralized system that certified news "accuracy" is the stuff of Orwellian fiction, though, so that's a non-starter. You could have a federated certification system, I suppose, where articles are published by individual journalists and then groups and institutions vouchsafe for the veracity of stories or the record of the journalist (sort of like TLS CAs or a web of trust of journalist peer review), but you still need to come up with a good way to pay all of the parties involved. That said, in principle, I'd rather pay for each individual article, or a monthly fee for access to nearly-all the articles available, than for a subscription to a very specific collection of articles in the way you do now with news subscriptions.

[leereeves]

For me, subscriptions are a deal breaker. Whenever possible, I avoid signing up for a recurring fee for something I only use occasionally.

[cgriswald]

For me, the deal breaker is that even with a subscription I am usually saddled with consuming the content the way they want me to and they only want me to consume it that way so they can still advertise to me.

[dzhiurgis]

Content providers are fragmented, you can't access it while abroad, you can't access it on additional device, you cannot copy it, you are subjected to fair use limitations, you must latest version of this insecure software to access the content...

[manarth]

  Its much easier for me to pay $10 a month

WSJ is $32.99 (+tax) a month, for digital access. That's a little harder to justify if you only occasionally read their content.

[anotheryou]

So check the "automatically pay everything below 30 cents" setting in your browser payment add-on or subscribe to the advertised flatrate shared between publishing houses (like spotify).