No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money. The problem lies squarely with hordes of credulous morons who either don’t know or don’t care that their news is fake, and aren’t willing to shell out for quality content. Whether that exposes a deeper flaw in human nature, or is just an oddity of our times, is left to you to decide.
> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.
The product of good journalism is investigation, reporting, and insight. What news organizations sell is a writeup. This is a mismatch. I'm interested in paying for the ideas, not the prose.
When, say, the Wall Street Journal reported on the Stormy Daniels hush money last year, everyone else re-reported it soon after. If you had a Journal subscription you got the news slightly sooner; otherwise, wait a tiny bit and every news organization from VICE to Breitbart has their own story about it too. Paying for the original source makes you feel good about supporting journalism, but that's it.
It's rather like the companies who produce a high-quality open-source product with a medium-quality cloud-hosted offering and then blame open source when Amazon also offers their high-quality product in the cloud. If the interesting and valuable part of your work is freely copiable and you're only charging for a delivery channel that anyone can provide, I feel bad for you but I'm entirely unsurprised your business model isn't working out.
Perhaps one answer, as with some open source code, is to see journalism as a social good in itself, worth supporting as an activity even if we don't have a way to turn its output into a profitable product. Perhaps another is, like other open source, to find people who have a commercial need for good journalism and have them subsidize it in the process in some way.
I keep hoping that something like GNU Taler will catch on. I have having subscriptions to various services, and I think something like Taler will help because it makes payments easier.
An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.
I had a subscription to The Economist for a little while, but I found that I still read other news sources and only read a handful of Economist articles. I want quality journalism, but having subscriptions to every source I trust is cost prohibitive and no single source has everything I want. I want a curated set of high quality articles for a constant price.
> An even better service would be to have something like Netflix, but for news. I could pay $X/month and have access to a variety of news sources. Ideally, those news sources would be paid according to their popularity and accuracy, and I would have a simple bill every month to pay instead of several.
Taler from what I understand does not require full details to be shared with the tax man, only agregates. That being said I don't think taler is anonymous at all.
If the end product of this is that society collapses because of the eventual effects of only fake news succeeding, then I'd say their model isn't "fine" at all.
> No, their model is fine. Sell a decent product for money.
The problem is how much of their model is built on giving away their product for free, they want all the benefits of being open and free to access (in googles index, shared on sites like HN) but they also want to be closed to non-subscribers, the two are mutually exclusive and they need to pick one.
Either way I consider this a solved problem with the BBC and/or PBS model, news is an important public service and shouldn't be left up to commercial behemoths.
If your Plan for Saving the World requires on changing human nature, overall intelligence,[1] or mass social behaviour, you're going to be Having a Bad Time.
Markets and information play poorly. Always have, always will.
________________________________
Notes:
1. Also known as the Lake Wobegon Fallacy. All the children aren't above average.
People, through their actions, have proven they want free and easy sensationalism. Not in-depth investigative reporting. You can't really just sell into that.
The popularity of investigative journalism podcasts from NPR, Gimlet, ProPublica, Center for Investigative Reporting, etc. seem to disprove this theory.
Outside of a few exceptional pieces the typical content on print "news" sites is utter garbage. The pressure to have a bunch of different columns publishing multiple stories a day seems like it really drives the quality down. All the super cool long-form investigative journalism gets totally buried by "stories" or "updates" that are basically just a headline and a sentence or two of actual content.
So? Tabloids have always been popular because they're entertaining. Movies are probably more popular than news too.
And BuzzFeed is a no different than NYT it WaPo at the macro scale. They just have a different idea about what the filler content should look like. Print news is really behind and have been fruitlessly playing catch-up due to a prestigious culture that holds reporting the most boring least relevant news as the highest ideal. The paper should be pushing a handful of super in-depth issues and putting the 'reporting' straight in the archive for news nerds.
NYT's Wirecutter is the most interesting innovation from an old guard news org I've seen in a while and is a good candidate to be some of that filler -- relevant, useful, and sometimes genuinely interesting.
Other than a few long-form pieces from investigative journalists that show up in my Twitter feed I would never actually read a newspaper. Print news 'content' is uninteresting, unimportant, irrelevant to anything that actually matters most of the time, just as sensationalist as the tabloids, mostly rage bait, and disempowering.
Podcasts where the format is they have to pick a single story to tell for the whole week gets this right. A daily book where on a typical day you can shread the whole thing without looking and not feel like you missed anything is only being kept alive by feaux prestige.
If those were the only two options, sure, NYT wins. But there are plenty of free options better than Breitbart. BBC News, NPR, and The Guardian are all decent, on par with NYT in my opinion. For local news, I've mostly found small sites that follow specific local issues to be better than the newspapers, e.g. in Houston the best weather news is Space City Weather [1], and in DC the best source for transit/urbanist news is Greater Greater Washington [2]. There are pretty good smaller news sites and blogs for specific issues too, e.g. I read SCOTUSblog for Supreme Court news, and FiveThirtyEight for stats-oriented sports and US politics coverage. For "ongoing" world-news events, I usually just read what Wikipedia has synthesized. None of these have paywalls, though some do ask for donations.
(I do subscribe to a few magazines though, just not newspapers.)
I don't think anyone argues that journalism is in a healthy place today, but what is the alternative? The problem is that real news costs real money to produce. Newspapers could be not-for-profit but their reporters would still need a salary to do their jobs.
Democracy Now Productions, the independent nonprofit
organization which produces Democracy Now!, is funded
entirely through contributions from listeners, viewers,
and foundations such as the Ford Foundation,[failed
verification] Lannan Foundation, J.M. Kaplan Fund,[4]
[5][6][unreliable source?] and does not accept
advertisers, corporate underwriting or government
funding.[7]
The remark from Bill Clinton is a fun bit:
Clinton defended his administration's policies and charged
Goodman with being "hostile and combative".[51]
While your question isn't wrong, how is that fundamentally different from how things were before? How can news be free if it relies upon paying readership for its sustained production?
There was a brief golden age of newspapers that went away with industrialization. It hasn't been Ben Franklin's game for a long time and I think people need to think about what that has meant and will mean.
It's my impression that early in Benjamin Franklin's publishing career he published newspapers so he could put ads in them to sell more books. And that later in his publishing career, he used his newspapers more to promote his revolutionary agenda. The man wasn't a journalist.
I'm curious as to when this mythical age of widespread access to "real news" existed. George Orwell dated it to at least 80 years ago ("History stopped in 1936")...
A sea change began with Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, seen as birthing modern, generally impartial, journalism. Not absolutely, but relative to earlier periods, quite.
Ironically, widespread national advertising assisted in much of. this, at least for stories not adversely concerning national advertisers. But local squelching of critical news was limited, and occasional nationally critical stories could appear. Watergate was arguably the high-water mark. Corporate ownership massively diluted effectiveness, especially after 1980, though exceptions remain.
Bookending Orwell and Lippmann, I'd suggest I.F. Stone (who calls the 1970s as a high-water mark) and Hamilton Holt's Commercialism and Journalism (1909).
There's a huge difference between biased or inaccurate coverage and flat out made up stories. The NYT publishes very few of the latter. Fake news sites publish 100% of the latter. That's a pretty significant difference.
My point is that people have been making the same complaint for a very long time, even back when people paid for news printed on sheets of paper.
"This kind of thing is frightening to me, because it often gives me the feeling that the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. [...] I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’ existed and were more or less discoverable."
I agree... not only did the internet enable access to all the information, but it also provided the most convenient interface (removing the possibility of collecting a profit margin from the production of physical goods). I'm not sure how a corporation can compete with that; they are simply not lean enough, but I feel like individuals still can. Become a good writer, do solid research, offer unique insights, and build a fanbase. Then sell T-shirts.