Fascinating. It's a shame that it's so hard to get people to pay for quality journalism. The world will be a dark place if the only news sources left are blogs by self-proclaimed journalists.
It's not. It's hard to get people to pay for a single site.
I read WSJ when I come across links from Hacker News, maybe 10x/month. I'm not gonna pay for that. I already pay for the NYT, the Economist and the New Yorker.
What's a shame is that there's no way for me to pay a set monthly fee for "news" and have that automatically proportioned among the sites I actually visit each month.
Perhaps you would end up with the same issue as Netflix where content providers raise their prices to the point that the aggregator would develop their own content in-house.
Or you could do Spotify for news, and dole out a percentage of the monthly subscription to publications based on the number of articles read.
There's so much friction in the payments system. I've gotta stop what I've doing, jump through all these hoops to sign up, and then do it again if I want to cancel. Times every single source I might want to subscribe to.
That's before I even get into the dollars involved.
I subscribe to the Economist print edition (with free digital), and the digital-only NYT and Washington Post. I just don't see myself signing up to the WSJ and the LA Times just to get rid of the paywall the once a month I hit it.
Similarly, I'm not going to subscribe to the Seattle Times (I don't live there anymore, but I like occasionally reading 'local' news from my hometown).
Again, micropayments. If it was 5 cents per article and zero friction, I'd be all over it.
It would not have to be involuntary. They could put up the paywall with a message that says "Click here to let us mine 5 cents of crypto. We'll let you view this article in exchange."
You're right, I guess letting some unknown entity use my stuff just feels weird. Money is the perfect medium for impersonal exchange of goods and services.
The best news source in NZ currently (in my opinion) is not behind a paywall, nor is it funded by advertising. It is the publicly funded Radio New Zealand (they have a news site along with the radio stations).
Similar could be said for Australian news sources (the publicly funded ABC and SBS networks being the two best sources of news there in my opinion).
I am so grateful for Australia's ABC News [1], on the web and TV.
For those who don't know they have a program called Media Watch which calls out biased reporting in the media - sometimes they even criticise their own organization when backed by evidence.
I have both a WSJ and FT subscription and WSJ seems to have better US and middle east coverage. FT seems to have more East Asian (as expected) and European coverage. WSJ is softer on the Trump administration with some articles in support of Trump policy initiatives, which probably turns some people off. FT is broadly negative about US economic populism and the Trump administration.
My comment wasn't meant to apply to a specific website/newspaper per se, but the general state of online news media. Surely you believe someone or some publication somewhere is performing quality journalism.
So, in your opinion, what is quality journalism?
Just because something is profitable doesn't mean it is quality. Clickbait titles bring in ad dollars, but no one argues they result in a better article/story.
I read WSJ when I come across links from Hacker News, maybe 10x/month. I'm not gonna pay for that. I already pay for the NYT, the Economist and the New Yorker.
What's a shame is that there's no way for me to pay a set monthly fee for "news" and have that automatically proportioned among the sites I actually visit each month.