[kyledrake]

But how will we pay the NYT to try to drag the US into wars while David Brooks lectures debt-loaded millennials about work ethic and family values unless we let them continue to exploit a bug in web browsers?

Monopolist news orgs are losing readership/revenue because they're terrible and refuse to change, not because of Chrome. Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.

[pier25]

> Meanwhile other, better forms of journalism are thriving.

Such as?

[orwin]

Most investigative journalism, at least in France, only live from subscribtion. And it is starting to works pretty well.

[shusson]

examples?

[ooOOoo]

Mediapart with subscriber numbers exceeding 150,000 and net profits in 2018 at almost 2 million euros

See https://blogs.mediapart.fr/edwy-plenel/blog/140319/eleven-ye...

[tandr]

so... they are making 13 1/3 euro per subscriber per year. Is it a good amount or not-so-good?

[antiwarDOTcom]

antiwar.com counterpunch.org unz.com

[samirm]

youtube/patreon

[UncleMeat]

Not scalable. This is like saying medical bills are under control because of GoFundMe. Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited and it requires tons of work for zero pay while you build a follower base large enough.

"Work for free for two years and maybe you will have a semi sustainable income" sucks.

Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.

[dexen]

>Not scalable

Yes, and that is a rather important advantage in case of news & opinion reporting.

The old system consisted [1] of small number of large, vertically integrated media outlets. Each of the outlets was pretty close to a single point of failure in our democratic processes: each had undue ability to influence popular ideas and opinions, and well understood focal points of partisanship and propaganda [2].

The new model, with distributed funding and distributed production of news content is a much healthier, much more resilient ecosystem, with no single points of failure. From my limited observation it is also less prone to creating two singular focal points of polarization ("left" vs "right"); instead people end up in loose, overlapping circles according to their varying interests, socio-political situation and the likes.

--

[1] started off as small outlets, but the more successful ones quickly accreted into large entities, and the internet era weeded out a lot of the smaller entities.

[2] to the point "FOX" and "CNN" has became pejoratives among politically active people.

[samirm]

Why does news have to be scalable? I don't understand your comparison to medical bills or gofundme either.

>Some people can support themselves with patreon but the number is limited

isn't that true for all industries?

>Crowdfunding also encourages extreme opinions and bubbles over neutral reporting.

lol wat. you got a source for that?

[UncleMeat]

The NYT has like 4,000 employees. There are 40,000 journalists in the US (just journalists). All of patreon has 100,000 creators.

The number of sustainable journalists is much more limited using crowdfunding than other monetization models.

How many patrons are giving to high quality neutral journalism? How many are giving to people that they personally like and agree with? Look at somebody like Jordan Peterson for an example of how on can leverage culture wars (instead of quality analysis) into cash.

[52-6F-62]

It appears your statement is a touch inaccurate:

https://www.statista.com/chart/3755/digital-subscribers-of-t...

I also have a hard time understanding why it should be free. If you don't want to pay for it, you don't have to pay for it. You also aren't entitled to their for free no more than the writers at the New York Times are entitled to your work for free.

[hn_throwaway_99]

I don't have a problem with the content not being available for free. But the publishers want the best of both worlds. They could easily, for example, make all content require a login, but they know that would kill their readership. This idea that they are somehow entitled to know how many times a non-logged in user has visited their site is absurd.

[kyledrake]

As that article points out, that is far more related to Trump being elected (something they played a major role in by helping squash a progressive reform candidate in favor of an institutionalist neoliberal) than to their browser paywall strategy. It says far more about how online media is rewarded for making things worse, a scary lesson I hope not too many people learn.

I don't get news from the NYT and am quite happy continuing to do that regardless of their monetary strategy (and by the way, Google is extremely profitable with free + ads).

[52-6F-62]

The starting date is in 2011 when they introduced a metered paywall and has seen an increase yearly. The "Trump effect" was a substantial boost in 2016, but only a part of the overall trend.

Google isn't free.

https://hackernoon.com/how-does-google-earn-money-as-simple-...

[rkachowski]

to be fair, they're not mutually exclusive.

It would be interesting to discover the stagnating effects of closing your doors to all but those willing to pay. Perhaps naively, I assume the majority of paying customers were dedicated readers before the paywalls went up. How are new users brought into the funnel of such an exclusive system?