[NeutronBoy]

> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article

The other side of the coin is that if you're a news organisation, "the economics just don't work" with micro payments. You can't fund a month long investigative report based on micropayments, even if it produces a prize-winning piece, if you don't have guaranteed income to support it. What happens if you spend the month investigating and don't find anything?

Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles that you know will resonate with your readers, rather than controversial pieces or in-depth, resource intensive research.

[Flammy]

> Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles that you know will resonate with your readers, rather than controversial pieces or in-depth, resource intensive research.

I actually disagree, from what has happened when trying ads ads (basically micropayments in terms of $ amount per view), we get click bait and sensationalist headlines for any news source which focuses on income-per-article-metrics.

[altcognito]

Click bait for people that agree with it.

"See what liberals/Trump did now!"

[TeMPOraL]

Clickbait for everyone. If you agree, you want to read it to confirm your beliefs. If you disagree, you want to read it to call bullshit and/or flame a bit in the comments sections. Publishers don't care, they get ad dollars either way. That's why so much of those clickbait articles are purposefully made outrage-inducing.

[jasode]

>You can't fund a month long investigative report based on micropayments,

But that type of expensive journalism also wasn't funded by subscriptions in the past. Woodword & Bernstein's long reporting on Watergate was funded by classified ads and advertising dollars from local businesses like car dealerships.

NYTimes was recently break-even and then somewhat profitable with digital subscriptions -- but they also had to reduce the headcount over the last 10 years to reduce costs. So far, no newspaper has successfully replaced all the previous ad dollars with digital subscription payments.

[jellicle]

That ship sailed a long time ago. The current status quo IS micro-payment per article, only it comes from advertisers instead of readers.

[stefco_]

Yes, but unlike clickbait advertising, microtransactions actually encourage a positive publisher-reader relationship. If you trust a news source to do good journalism and if you don't have to jump through hoops to pay for an article, my bet is that most people would happily throw down ¢10 or something for a good short read (or more for a better read). Conversely, I would be even more reluctant to read click bait if I was asked to pay to view it. So I think that micropayments is similar from a maximizing clicks perspective, but the incentive is actually to build a great relationship with readers.

[Cleisthenes]

My bet is you are overly optimistic and instead will have click bait for people with disposable income seeking articles that they can use to prove their point.

[smsm42]

To prove their point, other people must be able to read this article. Which means somebody has to pay for it. Maybe they should make sponsored links - if you have disposable income, finance 1000 people reading this article, in hope they get convinced by it. That'd be putting your money where your mouth is!

[dragonwriter]

Thats actually why subscriptions as a more significant revenue source are important: because of what the pay-per-view model does (whether it's advertisers or individuals please paying.)

[EGreg]

Instead of micropayments, why not have a Netflix-like aggregator experience with an overall subscription?

Also, has anyone considered that collaboration may be better than competition when it comes to news, and many other things? Look at open source and wikipedia beating the pants off closed source and britannica, encarta etc over the years.

Why not fund wikinews and such sites instead? Much less clickbait and spam and fake news. Different incentives.

[smsm42]

Wikipedia however is explicitly a secondary source, by design. For news, it becomes contradictory - because news naturally tends to be primary source things, why would you want secondary source news if you can have primary source ones?

Of course, nothing prevents wikinews from being primary source - but that requires much larger expenses of people actually doing original research and reporting (things explicitly shunned on the rest of Wikipedia) instead of refining, curating and summarizing existing source (which is a very useful thing too, but for news it's not enough).

[EGreg]

WikiNews.org

[smsm42]

Thank you, I know what wikinews is. I also know it can't exist without primary sources (and btw can't probably exist if all those become subscription-only).

[EGreg]

Well, that's where the monetary contributions would come in.

There would be a subscription service like Netflix. And people would contribute all kinds of things to it, including citizen journalism with their own cellphone videos etc. But it would be collaborative, not competitive. Only one story per news item.

[loceng]

Universal Basic Income will help with this, as basic living expenses will be covered, assuming we supply enough UBI that people can afford this, which I would suggest is part of necessity for a healthy society.

[chii]

But this is just another way of saying the gov't pays.

[loceng]

What is money? What are taxes? It's all relating to a promise of a certain amount of work will be done. Do we generally do free things for our family, for our elderly parents, etc? Yes, we do. It's the idea of imagine if what everyone did was to work in service of others, where no money was exchanged - but if literally everyone is helping you - you will be 100% taken care of. With automation we can replace - or rather we can free many people's time that would otherwise be needed. The construct and culture we've been born into, "educated" to believe, is flawed in getting us stuck in a non-abundance mindset - into a mindset of scarcity. In some parts of the world, sure perhaps that is the case currently, however we have the resources and knowledge to efficiently manage everything so everyone is taken care of. And Elon's helping give us more room and be able to mine more resources from space as well. The universe is big, there's abundance - we just have to allocate resources properly - which includes not being destructive with war and violence.

[stefco_]

> What happens if you spend the month investigating and don't find anything?

Same as what already happens; you don't write the story.

> Micro-payment per-article will only encourage "safe" journalism - articles that you know will resonate with your readers, rather than controversial pieces or in-depth, resource intensive research.

Maybe for some people, but for me it would have the opposite effect. If forced to pay for boring/unoriginal content, I would probably just not read it at all. I already do this for content that is behind subscription paywalls or that has hideous ads everywhere. If anything, being forced to pay for content I read would make me even more reluctant to read useless filler.

I am sure I am not alone. Hacker News in particular is seemingly filled with people who would rather throw down ¢10 or something many times a day than pay for 10 separate monthly subscriptions that don't reflect the actual proportion of reading you do on each journalism platform.

Given how much potential revenue is already lost by forcing people to pay for the full subscription, I don't believe that micropayments are an obviously inferior solution. They might prove to be flawed in some way, but I don't think that the points you make are good arguments against them.